In some ways, it might seem counterintuitive that Rob Gungor’s new Wilderman record deals with the increasing rift between lived experience and its digital approximation, given Gungor’s current base of operations in Marfa, Texas. Marfa is about as far as one can get — both metaphorically and literally — from coastal tech capitals, a place where a strong wind can knock the whole town offline for hours. Gungor and his partner Simone Rubi moved here in 2013 to start a decidedly low-fi cafe, Do Your Thing, where the patient customer will be rewarded with some of the finest coffee the Southwest has to offer.
But it’s more complicated than that, as a conversation with Gungor about the album’s recording revealed one sunny July afternoon. A deeper listen to Artifice, this new collection of yearning, polyrhythmic pop music, reveals the influence of other unexpected intersections: the digital African psychedelia explored by David Byrne, Talking Heads, and Brian Eno, the cut-and-pasted township anthems of Paul Simon’s Graceland, and the quiet resonance of Donald Judd’s permanently installed works.
Gungor decamped from Marfa to the legendary Sonic Ranch — a residential studio embedded in Chihuahuan desert, just outside of the border town of Tornillo, to start the jam sessions that would eventually become Artifice. Sonic Ranch has a reputation for producing such fascinating albums as this one, it has served as the incubator for tremendous records from Animal Collective, Beach House, The Mountain Goats, and Swans, among many others.
The list of players on the record includes members of the burgeoning Marfa community (Andy Stack of Wye Oak) old friend John Arndt (The Brilliance), Gungor’s Grammy-nominated brother Michael, McKenzie Smith (Midlake), Jeremy Harris, and Andrew McGuire. Hugo Nicholson (Radiohead, Father John Misty, Primal Scream) sat in as an engineer.
Gungor and his band spent a week at Sonic Ranch taking a hybrid of processes used for Remain in Light and Graceland as a blueprint. They recorded live improvisations with the idea in mind that Gungor would later recombine and rearrange these sounds into tangible songs. Sessions happened in a call-and-response mode, with Gungor looping a phrase on synth, and then being passed as a musical chalice through the circle of electric guitar, the percussion and drum players and finally back to Gungor to meditate on in his home studio. The end result is a complex work of digital existentialism that brings to mind Peter Gabriel’s Passion work, Joel Ford and Daniel Lopatin’s Games project and any number of pop groups that are undergirded with deep sociopolitical concerns.
Glide is thrilled to premiere the whimsical, Tropicália flavor of “Cope Trip.” Taking cues from Ween, Mac Demarco and Rex Orange County, Wilderman serves up a cleverly rhapsodic pop masterpiece.
“When it comes to the pandemic – we are all over it,” says Gungor. “We need to take a trip from time to time, in order to cope. Whether that be on a screen or in our brains. For me, making this song was my own escape during the lockdown. Hopefully, it does the same for you. ps. please just wear a mask and keep standing up for BIPOC. #blacklivesmatter””
