Track By Track: GUSH – Splash of Milk

This month will also feature a live performance of the record at Berghain in Berlin, alongside a collective of Glaswegian and London counterparts in the form of Tony Morris, Isa Gordon & Stuart McKenzie.

We asked GUSH to talk to us about the new record…

City Fog

Steven: City Fog is a Sun Ra esque track which was an early track we wrote, maybe even the first which came out of our 4 hour initial jam session where we wrote the majority of the tracks on this album. Lyrically it’s about the city or your local environment being covered in a fog so you lose bearing, and nothing is anymore like it once seemed. Trying to navigate yourself through a terrain, while everything is disorientating. It’s not a metaphor for now, that would be trite. 

Iván: City Fog was originally called “Orixas”. The first time we improvised this song, I was initially thinking about the polyrhythms used in rituals. More specifically, about the idea of forces of nature creating music by themselves as a response to a ritual. Furthermore, when we started developing the song, I kept adding effects as a soundscape resembling the idea of a dynamic tropical storm, from the quiet moments before it starts, until it reaches its peak, and then releases itself into clarity. 

I was sculpting pink noise in order to recreate and capture the feeling of a storm. I also picked elements that would highly resonate at certain moments, creating the immensity of a space where you could hear creatures from far away. Like those moments that could happen in a tropical place, where before a storm you can feel animals in distress because they sense something is about to happen. 

Over

Steven: Over is quite self explanatory, it’s when something is over but you are not quite accepting of that. Musically I like the distorted screams, it’s our tribute to Pitch Shifter who were one of my favourite bands growing up. Iván’s drum and bass fill is also a nod to the Lost Highway. I have a love hate relationship with David Lynch but this film is a good ‘un. 

Iván: I remember the recording process of Over (my favourite). We literally recorded more than 25 voices across this track. I tried to make a mix that is very psychological. I wanted to capture the feelings of distress, anger, anxiety, and burnout. I remember automating compression in a way that Steven’s voice would break over the whole mix, in order to create that feeling of “in your face”. Like your loudest scream finally being heard. 

Hieroglyph

Steven: Hieroglyph is a song about being misunderstood. Most of our songs have quite off time signatures, so I felt it was important to have a terrace chant song with a very stonking drum beat. I really like the bass in this song. The verse is the Hieroglyph singing, and the chorus is the crowd singing back to it. 

Iván: Hieroglyph is built around the tension between the claps and the snare, that slight flam between them gives the whole track a dragging, weighted groove. In my head, I always pictured people clapping along. In South American pop, claps are basically an open invitation to the audience. In Europe you have to be Freddie Mercury (or Nate Smith) to pull that off. Lmao. 

Naked In Netto

Steven: Naked in Netto is a nightmarish vision of waking up to realise that you are naked in a supermarket. I don’t really shop at Netto, I’m more of a Lidl guy, but onomatopoeically it makes more sense. I wanted Netto to take this up as a song for their advertising, so if you’re really this Netto, please write to us! I was singing a bit like Don’t Go Home with your Hard on, and some of the lyrics are based on a friend’s recollection of an older man dancing in the sauna to them, named Eierman. There’s also a bit of Mount Olympus thrown in because I love oracles. 

Iván: When Steven recorded the main synth of this song I told him it reminded me of a scene from Batman Returns because of the darkness of the sound and the mystery it gives the intro. This is one of my favourite lyrics. Somehow I found a huge freedom in being broke and being naked. Because when you have nothing to lose, you have nothing to protect. Being broke removes the fear of losing what you have, so you make decisions based purely on what you want, not what you’re afraid of losing. Nakedness has the same principle, it strips away everything you use to signal who you are to others. 

I Am A Reissue

Steven: I am a Reissue is written from the POV of a vinyl singing back to you, begging not to be repressed. It was also poking fun at the Britpop revival which must never be allowed to happen! People trying to remake a simulation of a simulation with no sense of irony. I lived through Nathan Barley thank you! I love the squelchy bass, it reminds me of when I saw Add N To X live and they were completely chaotic and headbanging with a theremin. This was a much needed glam stop, because things are so dark. It’s a bit like that book Blue of Noon. 

Iván: Sometimes I’m very skeptical about the decisions on chords, but this has a very good reason. From a musical point of view this is the most self-explanatory song on the album. Steven recorded 3 synths as an initial reference and then we rehearsed and improvised it in my studio. The most challenging part of the production was the transition between the instrumental part and the singing, and the instrumental part itself. The challenge was how to make an instrumental drum part that was interesting without it becoming a solo or losing the pocket feel that defines my playing. Because when we were playing it live there were all these different things happening on the drums (chops and fills) that I had to find a way to translate into a recording.

Tbh I’m not a fan of drum solos, I’m not Phil Collins or Keith Moon. I’m the total opposite actually. Minimal drum kits and playing in the pocket is what I truly enjoy as a drummer. So I didn’t want it to be completely played with acoustic drums, but also not completely with machines. That’s why it ended up as a hybrid between the two. I used brushes to play the drunken drag of the rhythm, which gives it that drunken groove feeling, and it evolved from there with 4 drum machines played consecutively. 

When Steven heard the instrumental part for the first time he told me: “this is hilarious.” Probably the most honest song on the album. Lol. 

Bodies

Steven: Bodies is slightly dark, but also reaffirming duality of the human body. Looking at an image of a body not moving and how it can signify the horror of mass death or the comfort when you see the body move and it was just sleeping. You can go back to sleep or cuddle up, Musically I wanted it to be based on 2 notes. Stripped down. Not minimalism, more quadratisch, praktisch, gut! 

Iván: I think this is the song where Steven shows more of his Heatsick side, just as for me it’s in City Fog or Face It where I show more of my Vanya side. All these layers of synths sliding and drifting, shifting towards another idea. The final part of the song I wanted to give an idea of pseudo-celebration, that’s why I used the claps. These claps are inspired by candombe music from Uruguay, claps are simple and they celebrate. It’s simple, like the notes at the beginning that drive the entire song. As if I’m celebrating something without worrying about what will happen, because at the end we all end up in the same place. It’s like someone telling you: Welcome. 

Scratch

Steven: Scratch is a reworking of the romantic Gothic novel, all sort of beasties coming out at night, and staring at the shadow waiting to see what comes out. Musically I wanted a phat Skunk Rock bassline, like Zoe Ball coming up and mistaking you for Beck, we are big fans of the producer Flood and I guess GUSH is a studio project as much of a live experience. 

Iván: Scratch was the first song that we actually recorded and probably one of my favourites. Steven changed the lyrics almost endlessly, making it also the last song we finished recording. Lol. 

The first element that appeared in the production of this song was the junk percussion I made. I was inspired by the timbre of the percussion and the music used in Santería and spiritualism rituals. When I was a teenager I was intrigued by the music used in these rituals, the irregularity of the accents make the time signatures unusual and almost hypnotic. During colonisation these were censored cultures that had to hide their rituals in order to keep them alive. It was through this process that Santería emerged, a syncretism between ancient African traditions, Catholicism and Spiritism, a disguise built out of necessity. That idea of something hidden but still present fascinated me. With Scratch I wanted to recreate that ritual percussion sonically, but with a different character than City Fog, where in City Fog the percussion is dominant, in Scratch it is hidden, buried underneath, still there but harder to find. 

I remember when I showed my recordings to Steven, he told me it reminded him of PJ Harvey’s earlier production, and he added the main synths that accompany the beat. We both loved it immediately. 

Face It

Steven: Face It is another of our new era. Iván went to a jazz conservatory, so I guess this is a marriage of that, To Live & Shave in LA and UK Funky. `Lyrically it talks about trying to run away from something before accepting the final show down with the end of level boss. . I never liked how westerns were so conservative, but then High Noon the only leftie one wasn’t good, and it has been proven that if you shoot a film set in the desert, it will invariably look amazing even if the plot is quite naff. So I guess this is more a fantasy of an odyssey into the night, but with some added superheroes because who wants to celebrate the mundane? That’s for reality TV! This newer track we also deliberately to put at the end of the album. It’s the first song where I didn’t play bass live and could focus on being “just” a singer. Which I am fully embracing now. I feel my delivery is a mix of Hasan Piker and Jennifer Herrema. 

Iván: Face It was the last song we produced and probably the most complex (over 60 stems, and the longest to mix). The original version was around 7 minutes long. Strangely, Steven told me that was too long. Lol. We agreed on 5:06. 

I remember sequencing the bass on my Octatrack and kept adding rhythms that would subdivide the main figure, creating different time signatures. I wanted a track built around one central bass figure that would constantly shift and evolve. When I showed it to Steven he added that synth that sounds like rubber, which locked in the drive of the whole thing. What I enjoyed the most was letting the beats jump from breakbeat to trip-hop to kuduro (lol) to techno, never letting you guess where it was going next. Each transition feels like stepping intoadifferentscenario. This ismywayofsaying: I’mnotcomplicated, I’m complex.

Buy the release HERE.