Returning home to New York in 2016, four years and several tours since the duo’s first release with Ghostly International, Thomas Mullarney III and Jacob Gossett knew the next direction would be different. Together they embarked on open-ended sessions, adopting a more linear style of songwriting compared to their previous loop and texture-driven method. They fundamentally constructed demos from piano chords and guitar phrases with vocal melodies, editing iterations almost ad infinitum, looking through each from a multitude of angles. Compositions expanded, while others pared back to where they began. Like the bending of light, this abstractive and patient process outlines a space and scale in which seemingly separate colors — minimalist ballads, elaborate pop spirituals, and driving dance sequences — can coexist at different speeds, fanning out with spectral cohesion. A prismatic collection Beacon call Gravity Pairs, which is set for a November 2nd release on Ghostly International.
“All matter is created by dividing gravity into pairs,” said 20th century scientific mystic Walter Russell, whose idiosyncratic “new world thought” writings and musically-informed schematic drawings were as fringe in their time as they are fascinating. Mullarney details the concept further: “‘Gravity Pairs’ is how Walter Russell describes the rhythmic order of the universe. I kept reading ‘pairs’ as both a noun and verb; simultaneously the elemental units of Russell’s balanced universe and the process that brings us together.” This curiosity of natural phenomena shines through the album’s kaleidoscopic artwork — dichroic glass prisms photographed by the band themselves —and its lyrics, most directly through the narrative device of light.
