Autolux guitarist Greg Edwards is well accustomed to the demands of recording your own music. In 1995, Edwards spent months recording what ended up being the band Failure‘s final album, Fantastic Planet — a sprawling alt-metal epic with a cinematic narrative.
Five years since the release of Future Perfect, Autolux’s full-length debut, the alt-rock trio only recently announced labels for its follow-up, titled Transit Transit (TBD Records in the US and ATP Recordings everywhere else). This time, though, Edwards says that he was a lot more comfortable waiting patiently.
For better or worse, fans of the Los Angeles trio will have to do the same until the yet-unannounced release date.
In 2000, Carla Azar and bassist/vocalist Eugene Goreshter, fresh from scoring Dariel Fo’s play Accidental Death of an Anarchist, invited Edwards to start what eventually became Autolux. This new working relationship reignited Edwards’ motivation and sense of direction after the demise of Failure, but still, he says that it took the band an entire year to write its first song.
“We wrote a lot of ideas,” he explains, “and we pursued them to a certain point, but it really wasn’t until we hit on the song ‘Turnstile Blues’ and we saw that through to the end that we saw what the heart of Autolux was.” The band shuttled seamlessly between space rock, psychedelia, and shoegaze and developed a penchant for honing effects-borne noise into pop hooks.
With the help of producer T-Bone Burnett (Allison Krause and Robert Plant, Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack), whom Edwards insists has the perfect sensibilities for Autolux, Future Perfect sounds like nothing else. Arguably a classic album, it possesses a sonic space with its own unique topography, flora, and fauna.
“That’s the whole game to me,” Edwards says, “making each album its own complete world. Maybe to my detriment, or to the band’s detriment, I tend to prioritize that before a song. Having a strong mood and emotional resonance — that has to come first before I even want to work on something and see it through to a song.”
Given its roundabout writing process, it’s doubtful that Autolux could cover the same ground on Transit Transit if it tried.
Prior to writing, Goreshter, Azar, and Edwards establish what Edwards refers to as “aesthetic-controlling ideas” in order to generally align their styles. All three members are film and visual-art enthusiasts, and their tastes outside of music often contribute to the band’s sound.
Musically, however, they prefer to stab in the dark for as long as it takes to find the right sound.
“It’s easier to know what you don’t like,” Edwards says, “and in doing that, you keep cutting away the block. And eventually, you look and there’s a shape that you do want. But if you’re offensively going for that shape, then you never get there.”
Sometimes, the more disgusted the band gets with its own output, the better. Edwards finds it useful. “You just have to move forward,” he says, “even when it doesn’t feel good, because this is what we do. We make music, and it doesn’t always feel special or magical. And then sometimes, what doesn’t feel good, you go back and listen to it and you think, ‘Wait a minute, that’s actually completely valid; we could pursue that idea.’ And then sometimes what you were excited about at the time, you listen to it the next day and you go, ‘This is awful; I never want to listen to it again. I never want to think even I’m capable of writing something like this again.'”
Atmosphere also plays a vital role in the band’s experimentation. “The traditional instrumentation of music is never interesting to me,” Edwards says. “I don’t respond to it. We try and use bass and guitar to create sounds that don’t necessarily sound like those instruments, to have a chaotic element but also have a strong melody and something that we can actually play again and again.
“It’s not like we have these little pop gems and pour all this chaos all over them. The chaos is an integral part from the ground up. I like when I hear a sound that’s out of control and chaotic and a little bit dissonant and strange in some way. I like to try and find either some kind of melody in there I can hear, or I like the battle of trying to put the vocal or another instrument over it that makes it more accessible to the ear.
“Of course,” he continues, “you can make a recording that’s just a photograph of a band live, but if you don’t add some production, that won’t work, because a band in a room playing through a loud PA creates an emotional response. On a recording, if you want to create the same kind of intensity, you have to employ little tricks.”
For Autolux, these little tricks tend to be very labor intensive. “It’s time consuming to get these ambient elements,” Edwards explains. “For us, the song just doesn’t even sound like the song, or doesn’t sound finished, until those things are there. Those kinds of things, which might seem so inconsequential, make a huge difference to us. And it might take you four or five hours to record one little transitional sound, just to get it to feel right.”
Autolux has already begun touring in support of Transit Transit. By the time the album finally comes out, many listeners will have already heard the new songs in person.
Fans are, in a sense, lucky to hear the music in this order. This way, the album experience becomes something to look forward to rather than taken for granted. Of course, Autolux doesn’t seem to be in any hurry, so fans might as well savor the wait.