Ghost Writers Merge Music With Pure Art
After watching experiencing a musical performance inclusive of video images and a live creation of a canvas painting before our eyes, we recently caught up with Kevin Peckham from Ghost Ghost. Kevin and his creative partner Karl Ward make up this band where they show their skills, each playing multiple instruments and simultaneously creating an ambiance on stage.
Tell us about the Ghost Ghost – how did you come up with that name for the band?
We’re both into poetry and big fans of the poet Wallace Stevens who uses ghosts as recurring element in some of his poems — often to toy with the idea of a “present absence.” I love that concept because it matches my understanding of how music works. Music is a series of noises separated by units of time. It takes distinctly human faculties to appreciate — memory of the immediate past, ability to project about the future… in other words: music only exists as a whole in the listener’s imagination. Add a story in the form of lyrics on top of a song and you have a whole second layer of abstraction– like what is left behind when a ghost leaves the room – the ghost ghost if you will.
We don’t actually believe in supernatural ghosts. We believe in the more powerful ones that live on in people’s minds and hearts. Like the friend you still care about who passed away years ago. We both have those and they pop up in our songs. “Peaceful Dreams” & “Hide & Seek” are both songs off of our EP “Of Innocence and Experience” that deal with friends we’ve lost.
Finally, we wanted a name that demonstrated the act of making music. “Ghost Ghost” does that. Repeat it aloud and you’ll hear it. The hard guttural “g” sound and the crisp aspirated “st”. It’s like a techno beat. Kick, snare, hi-hat in rapid succession. And, of course, repeated.
How do you know one another?
We first met in Grand Central Station, passing off keys for an apartment sublet in the east village. We got talking about Kurt Vonnegut and that somehow lead us into a conversation about music. Years later we shared a room in India for a mutual friend’s wedding. We bought an old guitar at an outdoor marketplace and spent a few drunken days swapping songs and telling stories. That is where and when we first plotted to form a band.
You are a duo with additional multi-media elements. Tell us more about that?
We are very interested in the transformative aspect of performed music. While I think audio alone can be a completely magical experience, I also think people are barraged with so much music in their daily lives that extra steps need to be taken during performances to help the audience get into that zone where they are truly open to experiencing and appreciating new art. It is our hope that the visuals help to create a deeper experience of the music.
We have some very talented allies in Charlie Kemmerer (painter) and Tim Bartlett (filmmaker, video artist) who perform with us at each show and help us to pursue and refine our interactive show. At this point our vision is much bigger than what we have been able to engineer in our rehearsal space and stage on small club venues… but bigger things are coming. We recently opened the interactive portion of the SXSW festival to a crowd of a couple thousand people at the Austin City Music Hall. We were able to work with a much larger screen and stage there than ever before and I hope that is a sign of things to come.
Who are your musical influences?
It might be easier to list who we’re not influenced by… but I would say we’re interested in any music that at its core reflects an authentic cultural moment and a set of people’s shared response or interpretation of that moment. So in an extremely simplified way you might say that punk music is the folk music of the disenfranchised urban (primarily white) youth of the late seventies — and hip/hop would be the black inner city counterpart of the same time. And techno — sometimes attacked as soulless — actually reflects, in my mind, a shared, distinctly suburban, angst of the late 80s and earl nineties. And the list goes on and on. Of course these genres really reflect many different moments in time and cultural changes as time goes on– and the perceived authenticity of the moment gets harder to maintain… look at ‘mainstream’ pop today for a great example. Over time people stop singing about what it’s like to be human in a place in time and start singing about what it’s like to be a celebrity. That’s a dead end in terms of an emotional sympathetic response. How could I possibly relate to Kanye as a human being? He’s not presenting himself that way. He’s presenting himself as a very self-absorbed superman. And if the song isn’t an attempt to form a connection between listener an audience, or recreate an authentic moment or feeling or idea, then what does it have to offer? A catchy beat and melody only take you so far. A great song requires emotional substance.
What I detest most is something like the modern country music industry that presents itself as a folk music with an elaborate fiction and nostalgia for a moment in time that never existed. Meanwhile, I can’t tune into a country station and hear Merle Haggard or Johny Cash. People who wrote songs that reflected and defined an actual culture.
As far as what we spend our time listening to — I tend to gravitate towards wordy lyricists and songwriters. Mountain Goats, Elvis Costello, Woody Guthrie, Neil Young, Bright Eyes, Death Cab, David Lowery, Mike Doughty. I also listen to a fair amount of punk music. More recently I’ve been interested in very contemporary indie music from Brooklyn. I try to track down everything I can from artists here who define themselves as indie pop, art rock, psychedelic, etc.— I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around the idea of a “Brooklyn sound”… I think there is one and I have some theories around discursive use of beats and layering… but I think we are doing ourselves a dis-service as a community until we are able to put forward the idea of a collective sound or character.
Karl listens to the widest range of music of everyone I’ve ever met. He’s deeply interested in beats and collects them naturally in the great encyclopedia of music which is his brain. I’m convinced he actually has a condition that Oliver Sachs describes in his book Musicophilia because he always hears music in his head — there’s always a song going in his brain every moment of his waking life. It turns out this condition is not all that rare. But I don’t particularly envy it. I have songs in my head a lot, but I love my silence too.
Talk to us about the writing process for your songs. How are your ideas born?
Karl and I are both fairly busy and somewhat competitive songwriters. Our last album “No Clothes on Ragged Island” was a concept album about Edna St. Vincent Millay. Karl wrote 5 songs and I wrote 5 songs for the album and they trace her life chronologically. We came up with the idea over bloody marys and challenged each other to write the entire album in a day. We did. And then we recorded the songs in just under a week. The whole project took 7 days from start to finish.
We don’t always move that quickly, but that was a project that just burst out of us. I suggested the concept because I had just finished reading Savage Beauty — a Millay biography that Karl had loved and recommended. It is a tremendous book about an amazing women — and her story was one that we were both passionate about re-creating in song.
What was your most memorable gig and why?
Recently we played a show in Houston, Texas — where Karl grew up. It was a really fun private party at an art gallery. What makes it most memorable is that we had the biggest performance malfunction we’ve ever had — we played an entire song in different time signatures – Karl was playing in 4/4 and I was playing in 3/4. Train wrecks like that are inevitable but I’m still amazed we made it through that song and recovered to play a great show. I think that proved to me what we’ve learned over the past three years — how to fail gracefully. You really need to be able to do that to be an artist. There was no finger pointing between us — we laughed, took our lumps, and got back to business. And that gives me confidence we’ll still be friends and we’ll still be doing this in 20, 30 years. We love it, and we’re fearless about taking risks, and sometimes it pays off and sometimes it doesn’t. Oh well. We do it because we love it.
What do you have in the works for 2011?
Everyone of our song arrangements is new as of 1-2 months ago so we have a lot of settling in to do. Last year we were an indie rock trio: guitar, bass, drums. Now we’re a duo with Karl creating beats out of live drums and singing and playing guitar while I play bass guitar and a series of keyboards and synthesizers. It’s taken a lot of time and attention to get this far, but we’re not finished. We want to refine and expand our sound and I think that will mean adding more musicians to the live ensemble. We already have one multi-instrumentalist — Mark Christensen – who lives in Vermont but joins us for as many gigs as possible. We’d also like to see what happens with another percussionist, maybe even horns & strings. We want to experiment with lots of combinations and see what sticks.
We also have two recording projects on the boards so we’re hopeful we can get out a new EP before the end of summer.
Where can we find your music or hear you play?
All of our music is available for listening or download at store.ghostghost.net. We’re also on Pandora and Last.fm, Facebook, etc. We try to play at least one show a month at home in NYC so sign-up for our mailing list and we’ll keep you posted.
