Austrian new wavy post punk act LORRAINE has been one of my favorite discoveries in the field of modern shoegazin’ rock of recent years, and it is my pleasure to report that one of the band’s members, Andreas, has started a new solo project called HAMILTON GERLACH. He recently put up a demo and you can stream it in its entirety below! His new tracks are an ambient-style continuation of the guitar-centered, hypnotic post-punk styles his friend Martin has been doing in LORRAINE and which the duo has begun to weave into Andreas’ ambient guitar shenanigans. HAMILTON GERLACH packs so much emotion and feel into so little and it is nothing short of magical. The demo impresses with the bare minimum and the whole offering holds together nicely.
Andreas commented on the background of HAMILTON GERLACH:
I’ve been really interested in the concept of musique concrète, ambient music and related electroacoustic experiments for quite some time, like recording incidental guitar music, playing around with tape loops, using drums arranged in a circle around guitar amplifiers to create eerie resonances, etc. – I’ve been doing stuff like this in the attic of my parents’ house whenever I’ve had the desire to flee from Vienna to the countryside. In that way, it’s quite an escapist approach to music for me, hence the rather somber and introspective “feel” (which, I guess, came naturally as a polar opposite to my erratic approach to playing drums..)..As for this particular new demo, the first two tracks actually came out of a few songwriting sessions with Martin, where we were going for a more dream pop oriented project (in comparison to the harsh and snappy songs we are known for in Lorraine) – he actually recorded some of the instruments on ‘ovary’ and ‘pearl’. While that shared endeavour somewhat fizzled out as we prepared for tours and releases during 2016, I continued to record alone and came up with the rest of this release. I also started building my own guitars out of an old walnut tree my dad had laying around – so for me all of this is really about the concept of ‘lost recordings’ or ‘found art’, recycling old ideas and transforming them into a different form.
Asked about performing live, he added:
At the moment I’m not really planning on doing any live shows, I’d rather write and record more music – at least for now. I’d like to use this project to reach out to more Viennese avantgarde musicians though and maybe do some collaborations.
