Altered Zones

By Emilie Friedlander

MP3: Gatekeeper: "Serpent"

Up until very recently, I found Gatekeeper’s sound to be completely inseparable from the smell of artificial smoke. I first caught them live this past January at a sold-out Glasslands Gallery on the Williamsburg waterfront, where they opened for Chicago electronic trio Salem, whose molasses-stuck, faux-occult drop-out anthems must have been floating around in the air when these two Columbia College alums first sat down in front of Ableton. The room was so thick with fog that you couldn’t see much farther than the outstretched Blackberry of the person standing right in front of you; Gatekeeper’s vertiginous, switched-on arpeggios and reverb-drenched downbeats seemed to be rising up from the same inscrutable place as the syrup-sweet smell that was filling my nose, and I remember thinking that 2010 would be the year of the smoke machine.

In a way, I was right-- or at least about Gatekeeper, whose partnership with Brooklyn artist collective Thunder Horse, also originally from Chicago, is responsible for their perennial displays of smoke, electric green backlights, and strobes. Until they graduate to full-on pyrotechnics (maybe someday...), former composition student Aaron David Ross and bedroom techno producer Matthew Arkell seem content with the tongue-in-cheek hyperbole of synthesizers that double as fog machines. Listening to their debut Giza EP today, out this week on London’s Merok, it is hard to separate Gatekeeper’s horror scores for the dancefloor from the tragicomic gestalt of their live performances.

Still, the album’s six tracks are way too compressed and treble-heavy to really feel at home in a club context. In fact, as Arkell told Altered Zones in an interview last month, they make the most sense “at two in the morning on your computer at night...when your imagination is open and susceptible.” The dream, he continued, would be to score “some multi-dimensional sci-fi film [with] scenes taking place in the desert, rainforest, post-apocalyptic cityscapes.” Their Giza VHS tape collaboration with Thunder Horse, which premiered in video-a-day installments on 20 Jazz Funk Greats last week, may very well be a step in this direction. But we really don’t need any visual aids to start seeing things when we listen to Giza-- it’s far too intertextual for that. All of its archival reference points-- from John Carptenter scores to library records, Chicago acid house to J.S. Bach-- are bound to the same tightly wound musical DNA.

Giza sends us off with the rumble of a motorcycle engine; from that point on, we’re careering non-stop, hightailing it through the bleak industrial landscapes of Detroit techno, dodging fire-breathing dragons and operatic vampires in the midst of Kosmiche space explorations, and pausing in mid-air to take in a private organ performance by the Phantom of the Opera himself. The accidental-rich pistoning of Bach’s divine sewing machine churns like a tireless engine room beneath each one of these retro-futurist nightmares; yet Gatekeeper's music always verges on a humorous caricature of the “macabre.” We want to laugh, we want to run for cover, but mostly, we just want to revel in the evocative ambiguity of it all. Smoke aside.

Giza is out now via Merok. The Gatekeeper/Thunderhorse VHS will be available this week via Merok, and thereafter from Hippos In Tanks. Peep the other five videos for the EP here