by Kristin Chambers
Beat Connection’s first full-length album, The Palace Garden is a mix of electronic dance riffs and upbeat vocals stemming from somewhere between tropical psychedelic pop and chill wave. Walking the lines of Yeasayer and Friendly Fires, it is a story-inspired album, each with its own chapter. Like our own life experiences, some are short and dreamy – perhaps a little random at times – while others are longer and more intense. But they all fit together in the end. Preferably, in this case, at a beachside dance party.
A project of Seattle duo Jordan Koplowitz and Reed Juenger, following up their EP Surf Noir, the album reflects a stream of synthesizers and maracas, pop beats and steel drums.
Now perfecting their sound live with band additions Jarred Katz (drums) and Tom Eddy (vocals), they continue to hold their keyboard closer than the guitar, and take turns mixing beats in the back of their tour van on the road.
In our interview, Juenger talked about growing up, Garageband, and what type of magical mysterious place The Palace Garden is.
What is the Palace Garden?
The Palace Garden is some type of amorphous space that can represent anything for the listener. It’s some type of fantasyland, and that’s the metaphor we developed. Some say it is a really fantastic place that you are not supposed to be, but you are there anyway, and the rest of the album is about trying to get back to that feeling. Whatever that represents for the listener. Coming to terms with that inability to get back there has to do more with yourself than with external factors, so it’s kind of your own fault because you’re not perceiving things as good as they once were. So I guess it has to do with nostalgia to some extent.
How have you guys grown since your EP Surf Noir?
I think the biggest thing is that Jordan and I just much better at producing now. We learned a lot in the span of time between the EP and this album and so I think the sound is pretty different. We got a lot better at recording live instruments; we recorded live drums for this album and that was an interesting challenge – bigger sonic elements. But compositionally we wanted to have an explicit narrative art to the album and that was something that helped guide our song writing, so we had a more kind of composed idea when we were going into it.
What type of vibe are you trying to convey through the album to listeners?
We are very composed when we talk about it. We have very strong ideas about what we want ascetically and what we want a listener to get out of it, but across the whole album we wanted to make something that was basically pop music and that could be easily digested on the surface level, but that had more staying power than that upon deeper listening. So there are a lot of references to other songs within the album. One song later on will reference an earlier song in order to strengthen it and pull it into a narrative. We just wanted to make something that was compelling to listen to but also had some type of deeper story. It works equally well being background music or being arty or actually being thoroughly listened to.
What’s up with people saying you guys started out making music with Garageband?
It’s how Jordan and I started learning initially. A good first step, but we don’t actually play on it. If someone were able to make music like ours in Garageband, I would be very impressed because that’s like using Microsoft paint to do a really good painting. (Apologizes for sounding cocky).
What’s in the future?
We’ve been talking about just trying to get weirder with the song structure and write all the songs that we want and learn how to perform them, which is often kind of a long process for us, because there is so much electronic stuff involved and so much producing involved in changing the parts when we record them. So learning to play them live and just practicing them and using that to actually rearrange the songs for the recordings afterwards. More experimental processes in the recording.
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