Ganglians
Heads Spinning Into Loops
Feb 24, 2010
Words by Sean Moeller
Illustration by Johnnie Cluney
Sound engineering by Mike Gentry
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Welcome to Daytrotter
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Never Mind
original version appears on Ganglians LP
This slow-jam originally came from a little ditty put together in about an hour one night, probably a full moon as heard in it's suggestive sway and general shape-shifting lyrics about the futility of material possessiveness while relishing in it's aesthetic pleasures. It was released with some of my other bedroom songs and our first band songs on the Ganglians S/T
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Blood On The Sand
original version appears on Ganglians EP
We wanted something deeply grooved to pummel the audience with, thus came this incesent, and white hot song about trying to escape past relationships and kinda being cocky about it. In rock songs you can really let yourself become a caricature of something in the course of a 3 min song.
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Hair
original version appears on Ganglians LP
This song is all about the anxious feeling of eternally waiting for a phone call that may never come.
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My House
unreleased
The body (our house) is a temple and to let people in to see it is always an unknown scary thing, and a struggle to understand.
We are all in this house of mirrors, or we will be as soon as you press the play button over on the side of the screen there. We are all feeling pretty wavy, pretty unlike ourselves. It's as if we've been slipped something - fairly scary and pretty remarkable - that's refracting our senses and garbling our thoughts. We're hearing voices and we can't tell where they're coming from - around the corner, another day, or fully made-up and whipping themselves into some form of tangible context. The house of mirrors is the construct of Sacramento, Calif., band Ganglians - which consists of just one true ganglian, lead singer Ryan Grubbs. He's a tall man who plays with vocal effects like a child messing with his or her food, letting it all stir together into some tripped out soup that can get messy if you're not careful enough. These Ganglians are careful, splitting their personalities, multiplying those personalities and still remaining honed in on the greater purpose at hand - or knowing where the exit doors are at the ends of songs. It all gets psychedelic and high, but there is regiment to the tangents and diversions that Grubbs and band careen into. The young group's two self-titled releases - one on Woodsist and the other on Captured Tracks, two of the premier fucked up lo-fi labels in the country - and their latest record "Monster Head Room," also on Woodsist, are made of the kind of beach house music that you start to hear when substances begin kicking in and the sun's been hot and heavy on your skin for a number of hours now, starting to actually cook your body. It's a music that's all about woozy feeling, about just getting carried away into very unfamiliar territory, where the lights are brighter and more colorful than they usually are and the sounds are made of freaky scripture and streams of consciousness. The Ganglians take us on walk-abouts, not trying to get us lost, but trying to make us suspect that we have no idea where we're going, letting us feel as distorted and as odd as we've ever felt, without feeling as if this is getting out-of-hand. It's as if we're in between these cheap and thin walls and there's activity and sweet sounds loudly wafting through the vents, thundering through the walls and the millions of mirrors are cracking, breaking and falling to pieces. But we're dancing on the pieces. We're unhurt. We're having fun and the crunchiness beneath our feet kind of looks pretty as our heads spin into loops.
Ganglians Official Site
Woodsist Records
Captured Tracks Records
