“WE HAVE A SICKNESS – IT’S CALLED ‘GUITAR PEDALS’!”
How the ambient music of Hammock is created – a “guitar symphony” with tons of effects but no rules
20
years into their recording career, ambient duo Hammock have emerged with their most ambitious, lifeaffirming and guitar-stuffed album to date. Devised by Nashville-based guitarists-cum-producers Marc Byrd and Andrew Thompson, Love In The Void is Hammock’s 12th LP.
The recording took place over 10 days at Trace Horse Studios and featured contributions from outside musicians and engineers. “When you get to a point where you feel comfortable failing in front of one another,” Marc says, “that’s when the magic starts to happen.” Enchanting from the off, the largely instrumental record spirals outwards from the beat-less reverie of Procession, to the melodically intricate It’s OK To Be Afraid Of The Universe, through heartpounding Ebow chaos at the epicentre of Gods Becoming Memories and beyond.
Dialling-in from Marc’s ‘Breathturn’ home studio for this interview, we find the pair hard at work building a new track around reversed guitars. Such out-of-the-box thinking is characteristic of their approach, and years of nudging boundaries has led them to perfect practices that many would never even imagine in service of their experimental masterpieces. “We come at it from a more intuitive place than a technical place,” Marc says. “Friends who had the training get bored with guitar a lot faster than I do. I don’t really relate to anyone who’s ever said they’re bored with the guitar, and I’ve been doing this for a long time.”
As Andrew puts it, “There’s neverending possibilities and that’s the beauty of it.” Whether exploring unfamiliar tunings or simply moving from one guitar to another, he underscores that “something new underneath your fingers,” is often all it takes to inspire the spirit of invention.
An average Hammock song will feature 12 or more guitar parts, ingeniously layered and mixed to create depth and texture. “To cut through the wall of sound by the end of a song, the main part will be doubled or tripled,” Marc says. “Sometimes that will be by taking the capo and going an octave up and playing that same part with a different voicing, and then you’ll have a counter-melody, an Ebow part and a swell guitar.” The results can be surprising, as Andrew explains. “It’s funny, there’ll be some songs with very few tracks that sound massive,” he says. “Then there’ll be ones that have a massive amount of tracks that sound very small. That’s all by design.”
Carving out space for melodies among the textural strata is key, and the duo cite the influence of David Gilmour, Johnny Marr and Lindsey Buckingham on their tasteful toplines. According to Marc, “The approach is: Instead of falling back on a wall of distortion and just adding another layer, how about adding another melody? Our manager thinks the way we approach guitar is like the way Brian Wilson approached harmonies in the Beach Boys.” Peter Katis - who mixed Hammock’s 2016 album Everything And Nothing, once coined it “guitar symphony”. “When we’re building songs with all these separate melodies, we set up each one as if it were in an orchestra,” Andrew says. “Each part will be the only thing on that track, so you can literally approach it when you mix as if you were conducting.”
A lifetime of collecting also means there’s a vast reserve of tonally different guitars to call upon as required, including a humbucker-clad Schecter Robert Smith Ultracure that Andrew dubs “surprisingly great”, as well as more likely suspects like Jazzmasters, Danelectros and various baritones. A 12-string Bilt Relevator, loaded with gold foils and resembling the lovechild of a Jaguar and a Baldwin-burns Double Six, earns a chef’s kiss from Byrd for its bold jangle, and a Gibson ES-165 Herb Ellis imparts its classy tones to the new album’s closing track The End Is The Beginning. “That thing, straight into an amp, is beautiful,” Andrew says.
As for how dry tones like this find a home amid slabs of delay, reverb and fuzz, Andrew distils the method: “What we’ll do a lot, if we have two or three guitars doing one part, is have a stereo guitar doing all the wash, and then
- for example, with something we were working on yesterday - a mono off to the right that’s pretty tripped out, and
a mono off to the left that’s basically dry. You get the clarity coming through but you still get the float.” Adds Marc: “Our doubling approach is not necessarily: get the sound, get the part and then double it with the same exact sound. We’re all about creating more warble in the part and making your head vibrate.”
To achieve this, they track through multiple amps, and make use of plenty of effects. “There’s a sickness we both suffer from - it’s called ‘guitar pedals’,” says Marc, whose initial interest was sparked by The Edge. But he’s quick to point out that an enormous ‘board is no shortcut to shoegaze mastery. Marc used to wear through the knees of his jeans studying the craft - and has often been hired just to manipulate pedals for other bands’ recording sessions. “A lot of people think they can do ambient music if they just have the right pedalboard, and they can’t,” he says. “It’s an artform in itself.”
Consequently, there’s no such thing as a “static” pedalboard when it comes to Hammock, and theirs are forever being yanked apart and re-configured. “It’s all in service of the song and that’s why it looks such a disaster all the time,” Andrew laughs. Marc cites the Bixonic Expandora fuzz as “one of my favourites because when you combine it with different distortions, it creates more clarity.” Then there’s an old school Line 6 DL4 Delay Modeler that’s featured on every album, and which Marc once spent two days straight fiddling with to develop the “signature Hammock auto swell”. They’ve recently had to upgrade to a MKII because years of vigorous tapping have worn out the original.
Thanks to having a zero tolerance policy towards complacency, a few old staples - including reverbs by Boss and a Keeley C4 Compressor - are currently relegated to the subs bench. Even the laptop they’re calling from sits atop a Roland Space Echo that used to inhabit the end of their chain, but which has recently been sidelined by the likes of
Strymon’s Nightsky, Walrus Audio’s R1 and, their current number one, the Neunaber Immerse MKII Ultimate Reverberator.
After years of self-direction, Marc has one key piece of advice to pass along: “There are no rules. If you have a good ear, trust your ear. There really shouldn’t be a limitation because someone at Guitar Center told you your pedalboard has to be set-up a certain way. The order of the modulation and distortion can be switched around depending on what you’re trying to do.”
While the tones themselves might emanate from myriad metal boxes, the overall sonic scope of Love In The Void was enabled by a lengthy creative process, which, in turn, was enabled by the fact that Hammock work to their own schedule, rather than that of a major label. Andrew reveals that their post-production phase takes “an obscene amount of time”, and the album is all the richer for having had eighteen months to evolve.
“Time is good for art,” Marc says. “It keeps you from taking this conveyor belt-type, utilitarian approach. There are times when you feel like you’re a channel; something rushes in and you’ve got to capture that moment of inspiration, but that’s the starting point. Get that down immediately, and build everything on top.”
“I DON’T RELATE TO ANYONE WHO’S EVER SAID THEY’RE BORED WITH THE GUITAR”
MARC BYRD