quickly, quickly: Balancing The Raw and The Refined
Graham Jonson is adept at changing directions. It’s evidenced, not only in the songwriting on his new album as quickly quickly, but also in the way he has pivoted multiple times in his life, producing music in a few different branches of the music tree.
Listening to Jonson’s new LP “I Heard That Noise” on Ghostly Intl, one wouldn’t expect that it came from a producer who first found success from posting lofi beats on Soundcloud. This is one of Jonson’s many pivots – once he’s cracked the code on whatever he’s trying to unlock, he moves on to the next challenge. The story so far: adept at piano since before he could walk, he writes songs on guitar to make himself more available to surprises; having started his professional life with lofi beats, his new album leans on stark drum sounds; even when armed with a candy-sweet pop hook, he’ll spin a song on a dime into what he calls a “musical jump scare” with terrifying aplomb.
Jonson describes these “jump scares” as taking a song he’s written and feeling the need to push it further. He explains, “Usually I know that this song is written, and I know I want to put it on the album, but I don’t.” This ambivalence about his own work comes from the feeling that there is still some juice left to squeeze from an idea. “The ethos of the album became those moments. Frequently I would come back to these songs after a few months and think, 'Okay, what can I do to obscure this song, or take it to a crazy place?'”
This has become the approach for Jonson – set it up only to burn down large swaths of it and reassess it from the core. “Once the vocals are done, I don't have to worry about the vocals anymore. Then I can shape the song. I'll just delete all the instruments in that section and keep the vocals, and I'll just start from scratch and add distorted guitar, or like at the end of “Take It From Me,” where the song sort of just dissolves into nothing like in the original version of that song. It's just a building thing - you have to have the building blocks of the song.”
Jonson thrives on combining the refined and crystalline with the rough and raw. Songs that contain intimate, bedroom-style recordings with acoustic instruments get whipped into frenzied electronic sound design or brash, distorted onslaughts of guitar. These massive surges can feel like a bolt from the blue, but by the time the song returns to terra firma, they give a listener a sense of relief, as if the tension and release wasn’t a hard left turn, but a necessary catharsis to make the comfort of his pop hooks even more grounded. Jonson describes “Raven” from the new album as an example.
“For the vocals on Raven, I recorded the guitar and vocals separately, but, I just recorded my voice with a mic on the table and then I left my drum mics on which are 5 feet away from me. So then you have this crazy stereo image as if you're in the room, and that's all intentional. I do love rawness in music, and I think because I don't have a conventionally good voice. My voice just kind of sounds like when I'm talking, you know – that rawness. One thing I learned is playing into that rather than trying to be a good singer, or get a perfect vocal take or something, because to me it feels more relatable. But then, yeah, with the production, choices are very distinctly made to add to that.”
This intricate approach to his production comes from the many pivot points in his musical journey so far. His love of sound design comes from his early dedication to beatmaking, and partly from his efforts to put that chapter in the past. “Making those moments and sound designing – I love that part of music the most. Taking out the drums on a lot of songs was a big thing for me, and adding a lot of acoustic instruments. I literally just can't help it. I need to add some crazy sound or something.”
Jonson’s drive to take himself in new directions, even unwittingly, is evident in his choices for songwriting methods. While this album features guitar in a range of guises as the main sound source, that isn’t Jonson’s first instrument. He explains that he was playing piano as early as age two. “That was my main thing for most of my childhood. My aunt is a music teacher, and made an album of classical flute music. So I started playing when I was two, just sitting at the piano. I took piano lessons from the time I was 5 until I was 18.” Despite this core grounding on the keys, he decided for this album to start elsewhere.
“‘I Heard That Noise’ was written on guitar. Every song. For me, the way that I write music is different on guitar. I love piano to death, that's my baby, but I just find that the music that I want to be making is usually best facilitated by guitar. I had the idea of making a folk album. I listened to a lot of Nick Drake, or Beverly Glenn Copeland, things that just don’t have drums. So in a natural way, I started writing songs that also didn't need drums on them. I'm always trying to get the lofi stuff in the past.”
"Frequently I would come back to these songs after a few months and think, ‘Okay, what can I do to obscure this song, or take it to a crazy place?’"
While his work as quickly quickly is focused on songwriting, there are still loads of delicate and intimate sonic weavings going on, within the songs themselves as well as the connective tissue between the songs that make the album flow. “There’s more found sound type stuff on this album. I was really into gathering sounds, recording a bunch of random stuff. Then if I need to add a texture I'll drag over a weird little audio clip from the Ableton browser. I have a whole folder just of random clips. I think the most obvious piece of found sound on the album is the very start of “This Room.” There's this creaky sounding thing, and I think that I recorded walking around my neighborhood.”
Sometimes these found sounds aren’t merely threads connecting the songs, they become the springboards for entire compositions. Jonson tells the origin story of one of the most unique and compelling pieces on the album “Beginning Band Day One.”
“My aunt used to teach beginner band, so like 5th grade. There’s an audio clip that she sent me from 2012 or something where she recorded a voice memo. It's a minute long. It's basically an orchestra of 5th graders who have no idea how to play their instruments. And I've always just thought the clip was so funny because of how cacophonous it is. I was wondering how I could use this clip and turn it into something beautiful. So what I did was just a whole bunch of resynthesizing. I think I put it through Melodyne and created that transition into the chord. That was maybe my proudest sound design moment. I have them credited on the vinyl. It says Nancy Teske and the OES 5th grade band.”
While Jonson’s voice and songcraft make up the substance of quickly quickly, at the sonic level, his curiosity and playfulness drive him to constantly pull at the threads of his own songs until they unravel into new forms. The tools he uses are often simple, but used in surprising ways. “I use 90% stock Ableton stuff. EQ Eight and Glue Compressor. I found the stuff that I really liked using when I first started making beats and just stuck to that. A lot of that is Drum Rack and Simpler. There are a few Max for Live plugins that are really great for resynthesis – Grain Reverser, and another one called Grain Freeze. A lot of it is audio manipulation with Warp Modes – taking a 15 second clip, and stretching it as long as possible, throwing it in Texture Mode, and then flatten the track or join the audio clip and then do it again, and then join it, and then do it again, over and over.”
“getsomerest/sleepwell” – an example of quickly, quickly’s early lofi beats output
This regeneration of sonic material into texture is in line with Jonson’s innate need to keep turning, spinning away and jumping onto the next possible iteration of his music. Even his own process of reinvention gets reinvented occasionally. One of the album’s most epic and elaborate pieces is also its most intimate and expository. “You Are” comes towards the end of the album and is the result of an entirely different process.
“I recorded the vocals first in just one take. I wrote all the lyrics down, and then I just recorded them and didn't have a melody in mind. I wasn’t singing to a pitch or metronome or anything. Then I built the whole song around that. I’d never done that before, and it was a cool new approach. Then the whole second half is like an entirely different song that I just hacked on to the end, but ended up working really well. Truthfully, it's not something I do, but sometimes you try something, and it just works. That one definitely has the shakiest vocal performance of them all, because I literally was kind of just mumbling through it. I didn't even know if it was going to work, so there are a lot of moments where I'm very pitchy, or I'm not on key, but I think it adds to the rawness on the album. I just thought it was a really fun experiment.”
Having navigated multiple corners of the musical landscape, and transformed his persona as well as his output, the core of Jonson’s creative work remains his restless curiosity about finding new textures, new techniques and new versions of himself.
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Text and interview: Kevin McHugh
Artist photo: Alec Marchant