Brett Bullion has spent much of the past decade behind the scenes, working as a producer and mixing engineer for Low, Samia, Bad Bad Hats and others. Over the past five years, Deep Glens has become the Minneapolis-based artist’s outlet for electronic exploration on his own terms. Deep Glens’ 2022 debut, Earn Grips, grew out of improvisations with custom-built software environments, blurring the line between composition and performance.
For Deep Glens’ new self-released LP, Carver, Bullion took a more tactile approach, recording hundreds of rhythmic, harmonic and textural fragments onto analog tape, splicing them into loops and sorting them into boxes. He then randomly selected loops as he sought out ways to make all the unrelated pieces coexist. So there’s the experimental DNA of influences like Boards Of Canada, Oneohtrix Point Never and Autechre. But there’s also an undeniable sense of humanity in the way Bullion uses the limitations and unpredictability of physical media as raw material for something that lives and breathes.
Bullion takes us through Carver track by track.
—Hobart Rowland
1) “OK AK”
“For the album in general, I used a Cycling ’74 Max to build generative sequencers. I’d record long jams onto reels of quarter-inch tape. Later, I’d make loops out of the best bits of those jams. They all got thrown into two Tupperware boxes: harmonic loops and rhythmic loops. Later, I’d grab two tape loops and put one on each tape deck. From there, I could use the varispeed control to make the harmony work and use gates and filter envelopes to make the rhythm work. This track was the same process, but with a few overdubs of synths played by hand. It’s dedicated to a friend who died far too young of cancer. When I need to stop and be in a moment, I sometimes say, ‘OK AK’ —because I think that’s what she’d want me to do.”
2) “Music Camp With The Kid from Monticello”
“When I was in late middle school or early high school, I did this summer music camp and was bunked with a kid from this small town in Minnesota. He was very kind but a bit green aesthetically/musically, and I played him ‘In A Beautiful Place Out In The Country’ by Boards Of Canada, and he just sort of freaked out and fell in love with it. For some reason, the vibe of this track reminded me of his spirit, so I named the track after him.”
3) “Face The Windmill”
“There’s a technique in exposure therapy called flooding, which is basically the opposite of small incremental steps to overcome a phobia. If you have a fear of elevators, you get on the elevator and you ride it until your anxiety subsides. Once, when I was out recording a massive wind turbine in a field, I was hit with some out-of-the-blue overpowering anxiety about the sheer size and power of the device. At first, I began to leave out of unease. But after considering for a moment, I turned to face the windmill and, after letting the anxiety burn out, had a fun time recording it with some contact mics.”
4) “Coin Machine”
“The day I was working on this track, I took a break to go to the bank and dump a huge jar of loose change for cash. They had one of those auto coin counter things, and I was watching this weird machine eat all my coins. I thought the vibe was the same as the track.”
5) “At The Table”
“Just a track made from a custom-built max sampler and a reverb that has bandpass filters tuned to the key of the song. The title is probably too personal to explain.”
6) “Guire Sleepover”
“The harmony of this track reminds me of that strange, hollow feeling of being the last kid awake at a sleepover. All your friends have gone to sleep, and you’re watching something like Point Break or Total Recall on TBS or whatever—maybe playing a bit of Doom II on the PC. Showing my age as an elder millennial, I guess.”
7) “Fisher Fading”
“The church my parents attended had this sort of intellectual lineage in their pastors. I was young, but my memory of that time was that they’d grapple with the hard theological problems in their sermons. And there was this sort of subtext that people of faith should walk with a humility, curiosity and grace about their world and their fellow humans. I’ve been an agnostic for a while now, but I’m grateful for that experience in organized religion. Very broadly speaking, I think that strain of faith has done a lot of good for Western civilization. Contrarily, the self-assured, self-rationalizing bits have done a lot of damage. I see the former fading.”
8) “The Last Band”
“This is a bit of a tribute to a band in Minneapolis called Happy Apple that I grew up watching as a high-school kid. Their approach to composing and improvising influenced a lot of how I think about performing live. I don’t think there has been a band quite like them since—so they’re the last band.”
9) “Everyone’s Together In Laquinta”
“Because, well, they are.”
10) “Perfect At The Depot”
“This one is probably a bit too personal to try and communicate the feeling behind. But technically, it’s a max patch of two synths playing at the same time, and they’re improvising off each other with conditionals … If this does this, then I’ll do this, etc. I was then using the computer keyboard to change what mode of the scale the synths were referencing, doing performances of the ‘song’ that way, and then dubbing it out further with feedback loops on my console.”
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