Highsigh may be a new name, but band members Ro Lundberg (JOBS), John Dieterich (Deerhoof) and Matt Mehlan (Skeletons) have spent years crossing paths. Once Bend (Joyful Noise) grew out of that shared history. Rather than writing songs from the ground up, each member contributed unfinished sketches, rhythmic ideas and abandoned fragments that were then reshaped into something new.
Recorded over an extended period and fleshed out with contributions from Macie Stewart, Paige Alice Naylor, Ben LaMar Gay, Lia Kohl, Tim Barnes, Max Jaffe and others, Once Bend fashions mutant pop melodies, abstract electronics, interlocking guitars, bowed bass and inventive percussion into songs that blur the line between composition and improvisation.
Here’s more on each track from Mehlan, Lundberg and Dieterich.
—Hobart Rowland
1) “Don’t Crowd The Eye”
Mehlan: “A fun part of any collaboration is talking about what the ideas will be before you start working on it. I remember an early conversation between the three of us that had me thinking we were making a drum trio with three non-drummers—like the Portsmouth Sinfonia, where everyone is trying something outside their area of expertise. That’s not ultimately exactly how we proceeded, but at the core of ‘Don’t Crowd The Eye’ and the other tunes is a shifting polyrhythmic sensibility. Lyrically, I’m interested in simple moments of revelation … What’s the environment? What’s the feeling? This also feels like a theme across this album.”
2) “I Love The Room I Live In”
Lundberg: “I’ve carried around the bass line that grounds this song since a 2012 recording session in Woodstock (N.Y.) with my friend Shannon Fields for his unique and amazing Leverage Models. We were experimenting, listening to lots of Morris Day And The Time and new jack swing—improvising, jamming and extrapolating from there. This bass line popped out as we rolled, and I fell in love with it. It didn’t get used there, but I kept carrying it around in my head for years. It was one of the first scraps I offered John and Matt—and eventually Macie and Max, who contributed to the final song. The whole song took shape around it … driving drums, layers of chopped-up synths, the biting-but-lyrical improvised guitar commentary. Macie distilled a final structure from all that, seeing a way for the vocals to both support what was there and define the song into something catchy and inviting, yet also introspective.”
3) “Relax Redux”
Lundberg: “This started as a loping, midtempo modular-synth groove Matt provided. John leant me an old Yamaha PortaSound synth, which became my go-to synth for the record. This song grew around an incessant hemiola synth part I cooked up. From there, layers of plucked double bass, guitars and drums were piled atop. The song was capped off with lyrics that function like they’re trying to recount a fever dream—in this case watching Everything Everywhere All At Once on a delirious transatlantic flight combined with a solo car tour listening to (Kim Stanley Robinson’s) The Ministry For The Future on audiobook. It’s all packaged into a tight duet harmony between Ro and Alexandra Lakind.”
4) “Islands Of Affinity”
Dieterich: “Some of the original guitar parts for ‘Plastic Designed Spoonlike’ left in their simple state.”
5) “Plastic Designed Spoonlike”
Dieterich: “The basis for this music began as ideas for a Phew record I was asked to contribute to that ended up not being used. In the end, they slotted in perfectly with the aesthetic Venn diagram this band ended up intentionally and unintentionally creating, developing so many new layers of meaning once everyone chipped in. That bright piezo pickup sound ended up being reflected all over the record, between Ro’s DI-piezo upright-bass sounds and Matt’s crunchy electronics.”
Mehlan: “Have you ever gotten a yogurt from the bodega and the spoon leaves your face looking like Heath Ledger’s Joker? It got me thinking about design … and purpose versus reality versus being. I could listen to John’s guitars here for hours.”
6) “Fertile”
Dieterich: “This began as a failed electronic experiment that had promise. I’d been sitting on it for a bit and could never find a way to bring it to life. Once Ro added the bass line, it started to become something. All the distorted guitar lines were constructed by transcribing little ideas from the original electronic version and transferring them to guitar. It lent itself well to this kind of angular approach. I love the way this one simmers.”
Lundberg: “John first presented what became ‘Fertile’ as swirling, propulsive instrumental layers of percussion tracks and synths. We stretched the form to find moments of stasis while mimicking and replacing the electronic sounds with drip-drop layers of guitars and double bass.”
7) “To Grow In Lightness”
Dieterich: “‘To Grow In Lightness,’ ‘Outcome Inevitable’ and ‘Unrememberable’ were all constructed from different layers of instruments in Once Bend. One of the realities of making a record the way we did—collaboratively, over a long period of time, with no particular goal in mind—is that we’d occasionally rediscover some layer of music in a session that fit perfectly with the song but also felt like it wasn’t getting highlighted in the way we wished it was. There are so many interesting pieces to this record, and we wanted to make sure that our faves got their little moments in the sun. The interlude ideas came out of that. We built the songs on the electronic drums, so we were trying—with varying degrees of success—to find places for the acoustic drums to shine without totally altering the rhythmic feel. It ended up being one of the defining aspects of the album to me—this strange interplay between states of mind/approaches. Trying to reconcile seemingly unreconcilable rhythmic feels, emotions and palettes. Trying to retain all their uniqueness while not letting them get in the way of one another.”
8) “Words We Choose”
Dieterich: “Lovingly referred to in the band as ‘DanceDance,’ this was an initiative greenlighted in our lab for maximum mind-freeze dance operations.”
Mehlan: “Another rhythmic idea that really took on new shapes each time one of us, or a collaborator, worked on it. In patching together shapes and ideas, each motorik or electronic part we started was pushed and pulled into new flexible organic ones. Ro’s lyrics here—‘Our words, never our own/Words we choose, never our own’—tap into what I hear as the playfulness of the beat and groove in such a deep way. A lyric I wrote and never used feels descriptive here: ‘What is this dance? What is its meaning?’”
9) “Take Care”
Lundberg: “This song is probably the clearest example of my fascination with rhythms that can be felt in different ways and seem to shift and mutate throughout a song without changing. The whole song was composed around the drum groove that enters at one minute in … But the song takes some major shifts in feel around this. John brought life to this rhythmic exercise by delicately layering the guitar/synth melody on top, which Paige and Ben then wove their vocal-and-horn exchanges within.”
10) “Would Be Great”
Lundberg: “Again initiated by one of Matt’s simmering modular-synth drum parts, this song feels like it could be the prelude or overture or interstitial music to an unwritten opera. Ro layered on grand, gradual drops of harmony—chords not necessarily in the same key or clearly related but stitched together by a common tone here or there. These different harmonic spaces were then enlivened by John’s guitar musings and my semi-nonsensical lyrical musings drawn from predictive text suggestions with conversations with Matt.”
11) “Outcome Inevitable”
Dieterich: “See note for track seven.”
12) “Once Bend”
Mehlan: “The rhythmic bed is, at its core, driven by the Plumbutter, a ‘drum and drama’ machine designed by Peter Blasser and his synth company, Ciat-Lonbarde. Its design, from left to right, is modeled as a gradient/dichotomy of urban to rural and feels metaphoric to this band. Its deep groove, which follows a cloud-like structure of things coming and passing, was a foundation for some of our first overdubs, with the great percussionist Tim Barnes laying down some drum set. Paige Naylor’s list-like vocals, Lia Kohl’s cello overdubs and Ben Lamar-Gay’s cornet all followed suit as cloud formations making themselves known and then moving on—sometimes returning in new formations.”
13) “Unrememberable”
Dieterich: “See note for track seven.”
