deep glens drops rumbling ‘music camp with the kid from monticello’
DEEP GLENS
carver LP
September 17 (Independent)
PRE-ORDER/PRE-SAVE
‘music camp with the kid from monticello‘ is out now, buy/stream it here.
deep glens, the electronic project of Brett Bullion returns today with his latest release, ‘music camp with the kid from monticello‘ ahead of his new album carver out independently on September 17. LISTEN HERE.
Where his previous track ‘ok ak’ illustrated deep glens’ shapeshifting wall of sound, praised by Paste Magazine as “fragmented but beautiful”, today’s new single continues his ability to build experiences led by boundless creative perimeters. As another personal composition, ‘music camp with the kid from monticello’ is charged on a rolling soundscape and broken beat, reflective of his production style across carver that sees him randomly picking rhythm and harmonic analog tape loops from a box and shaping them with processing in order to work together as a complete composition.
Of the track’s origins deep glens explains “When I was a kid, I attended a summer music camp at a small college on a hill in southern Minnesota. I was bunked in a dorm with this friendly and green kid from Monticello. Monticello is a smaller town northwest of Minneapolis. The kid was genuine and kind in a uniquely midwestern way. ‘In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country’ had just come out on Warp. I remember playing this for him and his mind was blown. He couldn’t understand how any music like that was made. He was a conservative and classically trained musician so hearing any music outside of either mainstream radio or classical was alien to him. But he was just so earnestly intrigued and moved by it.
It was as if he had just discovered some secret place out in the woods that he could keep for himself. It was inspiring to me to see that happen to someone else, as it had for me. For whatever reason the harmony and texture in this track reminded me of that kid, and so it is named for him.”
Across carver, deep glens shifts his craft focus from software systems to physical media through a ‘tape-based approach’ that sees hundreds of analog tape loops containing rhythmic, harmonic, and textural fragments recorded, spliced and randomly selected before being reshaped through speed manipulation, filtering, and other studio processes. Beneath all technical methods, deep glens draws from accumulated experience, memory and accident while reflecting on aging, uncertainty and the human impulse to create something new from whatever materials are on hand.
Drawing from his earliest musical interests, deep glens makes exploratory music shaped by experimentation, process and sound design. His debut album Earn Grips was constructed from improvisations within custom-built software environments and blurred the boundaries between composition and performance, landing somewhere between Boards of Canada’s Hi Scores, Oneohtrix Point Never’s Tranquilizer or Autechre’s SIGN, the latter of which also he supported on tour last year for their TwentyTwentyFive Tour.
Over the past decade, Bullion has built a reputation behind the scenes through his work as an acclaimed sound engineer, having worked across projects with a range of genres including slow-motion rock band Low (Double Negative), indie-rock Samia (Bloodless), pop trio Bad Bad Hats and more. Through this work deep glens emerged as the sound of someone with the spirit of bedroom electronic composition with the perspective of a lifelong studio engineer.