Sydney four-piece Ghoul first came to attention in 2008, with a free mini-album posted online titled A Mouthfull of Gold.
The spectral set was heavy with tone experiments, spooky acoustic meanderings, cut n paste studio chatter and, most beguiling, the quivering, crooning voice of frontman Ivan Vizintin. The release saw the band start playing live shows, which while nodding to the release, would more just reference the bands jagged studio work than recreate it. A follow up, sister release to A Mouthfull of Gold came in Abandoned / Afternoon / Ambient, which consisted of demos, detours and instrumental passages borne from A Mouthfull of Gold. From there the band would play live, but were relatively quiet.
Now comes the bands first "proper" release. Aka on a label. Sydney crew Speak n Spell are releasing Dunks, another mini-album from the band, one that sees them attempt to find a middle ground between the heady, studio effects of their previous releases with the instrumentation and "band" construct of the live set. We spoke to frontman and fastidious producer Ivan Vizintin on the eve of the release, to discuss the bands looong recording process, confidence, poetry and democracy.
Ghoul's Dunks is our feature record on TheVine. Listen to it in the right-hand column of the page.
When the recording button goes on, Vizintin is explaining how his day-job is mostly spent editing audio and video footage together.
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...I put some audio up. Cut the clips to that. Yeah, pretty basic.
So much of your music sounds similar to that idea. Lots of edits, both obvious and not. Audio clipping that repeats, etcetera.
Yeah sure. Yeah.
Do you think your job feeds into the music or vice versa?
No. No I try to keep them as separate as possible.
The process I mean.
Um, no. Everything [the band does] is really painstaking. We over-think. While [the job] is something that's quick. So, maybe elements are shared but...when we're doing something musically together, it's more of a conscious thing. With work it's instinct. Going 'Well this might sound good. Let's just do this quickly and have it done so the client is happy. Whatever.' Whereas [with Ghoul] we spend hours and hours putting something in a specific place and seeing what it sounds like. It's much more painstaking. Writing music is a fuckin' painful process [laughs].
One of my favourite things about Ghoul was reading your recording diaries on MySpace around the time you put out A Mouthfull of Gold. You were going into a lot of detail. But you stopped writing it. Why?
Well it was really misleading. Because when we started, I thought it would be really cool, because I've always been interested in what people do when they record. We started it and we kept on saying 'Oh it's nearly done, it's nearly done'. And then it wasn't going to be done. So we thought we better take it down. And I don't know - it was a bit embarrassing in parts. There were some things that we shouldn't have said. Maybe we'll do it again when we have a more concrete schedule. It was just a thing when we were saying 'Oh it will be done in a month or two'. And it ended up being a year and a half getting it finished.
Did it bother you that writing it might lose some of the mystery of the band?
Yeah, no. Oh not 'mystery'. At the time I was really afraid we were spending way too long making this record. Because Mouthfull... was done in two months. It was written and recorded in two months. That was really great, and that's how long I thought Dunks would take. But things unravelled and we wrote so many songs for Dunks and then ended up culling them all because they were really shit [laughs]. So I don't know. You start off with this concrete idea of what you want it to sound like and then it evolves. And then it doesn't sound like anything you thought it would.
We pretty much had Dunks finished in September of 2009. And it was really close to what Mouthfull.. was like. Completely different songs - some of the same songs - but all the tracks were really short. Ideas that didn't really develop as far as they could. I played it to a friend and he was like 'This is great. But why does it go for a minute and a half?'. And I was like, 'Oh that's a good point'.
A Mouthfull of Gold was impossible to perform. You can't really play for two minutes in front of a bunch of people. They just stare at you and go, 'Oh is the song finished? Is it over?'. So yeah, my friend told me 'You should really go back and work on it more', and that was a real moment for me. 'What? But it's done?'. And then I began to doubt it and it sort of dragged out the whole process. [But] for the better I think.