Minneapolis psych-folk troubadours Steve Palmer and Matt Beachey under the guise of Slow Clarity draw on Sandy Bull, Robbie Basho, Fahey, Ben Chasny and co to produce a wonderfully lysergic fingerpicking dreamscape.

‘Holding Pattern’ branches off of the various finger picking traditions of the acoustic guitar, but it goes quite a few different places from there, from Reichian minimalism to deep meditative drone and psychedelic chooogle. It’s entirely self/home-recorded and self-mixed/produced, and with this record the duo aspire to continue the conversation started by artists like Prana Crafter, Bill Orcutt, Elkhorn, Barry Walker Jr., East of the Valley Blues, and perhaps their personal favorite guitar duo, French minimalists Vincent Le Masne and Bertrand Porquet.

“There’s something special about capturing a moment in time”

Would you like to discuss a bit of background, how did you first get interested in guitar based music?

Steve Palmer: Having a cool older brother (who is ten years older than me) allowed his music taste to rub off on me at a pretty early age (I would “borrow” (steal) his CDs). He was a teen during the prime grunge/alternative era (I recall buying him a Nirvana ‘B-Side Themselves’ comp for his birthday), so some of that stuff piqued my ears, but I was mainly drawn to the angst and energy of the punk he liked. Was kind of a lonely and politically frustrated kid- the George W. Bush years, after all. ‘Energy’ by Operation Ivy was probably my favorite record then. I got my first guitar only in my freshman year of college, and learned about a much more diverse array of music there, but for a long time it was mostly power chords and very simple “cowboy chords” sort of stuff. More of a lark. I didn’t find my voice or become halfway decent until much later.

Matt Beachey: My parents were kind of OG Windham Hill heads, so growing up I heard a lot of Alex De Grassi, Will Ackerman, Leo Kottke and the sort. Also a group called Penguin Cafe Orchestra, who is maybe a stretch to classify as “guitar music,” but who could certainly be classified as “fretted instrument music” a lot of the time. Years after hearing them frequently in my childhood, I was surprised to discover that they’re something of a head-favorite in certain underground circles. I think a lot of the weird music I listen to/make now doesn’t necessarily jive with my parents tastes, but I think a lot of my weirder musical impulses stem from that group.

Ramble Records and Echodelick Records are doing such a wonderful job and I’m excited about pretty much everything they are releasing these days. How did you get in touch with them?

Steve: Elon’s embarrassing, cringy incompetence aside, for me and many folks I know IRL and from online, Twitter is the only reason anyone knows anything about our music. Marcus Obst from the wonderful Dying For Bad Music (seriously has his ear to the ground for neo American Primitive stuff, highly recommend checking out his site/feeds) found me on Bandcamp and plugged me on his socials. Then he really changed my life by offering to put out a release, ‘Unblinking Sun’. That kind of put me on the radar of the collective of online music folks into obscure/weirdo stuff and got me into a little circle of like-minded music fans on Twitter, including Sunrise Ocean Bender/Deep Water Acres who released my LP ‘Useful Histories’. Out of the blue, Michael from Ramble contacted me about a year or so ago, and here we are.

Matt: I really have to credit Steve for basically all of our/my musical connections. We’ve both made a lot of friends of other musicians, writers, label runners over the last decade, but it really all stems from him getting that initial bump from Marcus from Dying for Bad Music.

There are so many wonderful champions of other people’s music out there in underground scenes. In some ways, it feels like every weird/experimental scene in cities across America, or Europe, or Australia, are really just one scene, and as you get to know more people it all feels surprisingly small. Just to name a few, people like compulsive home recorder Josh Moss of The Modern Folk, or prolific taper Joel Berk (who also plays as Ragenap), or premiere underground booker of the Midwest Jen Powers (who also plays with her awesome husband in Powers/Rolin Duo) are all wonderful examples of people who have dedicated their lives to not just music, but to building borderless scenes, connecting other people who make music, and fiercely championing any and all music that they love. I really don’t think anyone would remotely care about our music if it weren’t people like them who tirelessly book shows, write blog posts, put out records, or whatever. We’re incredibly grateful to everyone who’s shared our music, and I hope I can return the favor.

“My musical relationship was primarily based around listening to music together”

When did you first meet and what led you to start the project together?

Steve: It again comes back to freshman year of college. Matt was two doors down from me in the dorm and we’ve been close friends since. I’ve said before that he basically taught me guitar. He showed me lots of tips and tricks and broadened my skill set beyond just power chords, but also influenced the progression of my taste from punk into weirder realms. We had a goofy cover band in college, would also just screw around on pedals and samplers late at night in the dorms, and lived together for a few years post college. We never had an intent to have a “project,” we mostly would on a lark record random sessions of us messing about. Then Jordan Spencer, who runs/ran(?) Cabin Floor Esoterica, offered to put out a release and that had us digging through our archives. That release was under our names but was titled “Slow Clarity,” a name which we later adopted for any duo performances or releases.

Matt: For a long time Steve and my musical relationship was primarily based around listening to music together. We had a band together in college, as Steve mentioned, but we mostly played covers. But we used to spend countless hours getting high and just sitting and listening in awe to whatever new weird music we found. And I think that allowed us to slowly build up a sort of shared vocabulary for what we liked, and what kind of music we would eventually start making together. I think our first real collaboration that truly precedes what we do now was the track ‘Six Dollar Sunglasses’ from Steve’s first album ‘Unblinking Sun’. That kind of laid the blueprint for how we would go on to collaborate and write together in the future.

How would you compare your guitar playing and music making? How do you accompany each other when it comes to music making? Do you usually improvise until you have a finished idea or is there any other way?

Matt: A good chunk of the album was generated from on the spot improvisation, sometimes around a particular idea or theme. The tracks ‘Transient Global Amnesia,’ ‘The Circlemaker,’ and ‘Phase Lag’ were all cut from a single reel of tape Steve and I laid down one afternoon in an attempt to write a song by jamming as a mode of composition. Ultimately, we finished that song and it became a central part of our live repertoire (it did not make ‘Holding Pattern,’ but we are still intent on putting it on a future release), and those old sketches were largely forgotten until I dug them back up years later. I think we were both pretty surprised by what we found when we listened back again. There were lots of great passages and lines, and then abrupt fuckups or endings, as we weren’t really intending on using the recordings, so I had to do a bit of editing and chopping to assemble the three songs we pulled out of it. Improvisation and later self-curation/editing has become one of my favorite ways to generate recorded music lately.

There’s something special about capturing a moment in time that you can’t even quite remember later. I’m a big believer in the idea of the genius of the subconscious. I think nearly everyone has an immense capacity to dream up wonderful bizzaro marvelous things, as evidenced by the fact that we all literally dream at night, whether music or sight or just some deep feeling. And I think the waking mind, or ego, or whatever, the thing we usually think of as our “self,” inhibits that natural capacity our brain has most of the time. But when you practice improvising deeply, it’s sort of like practicing meditation, or lucid dreaming, and you begin to acquaint your ego with that vast well. Or maybe your ego steps out of the way and is no longer a part of the equation altogether. I’m not really sure. But either way, there’s something magical about letting go of the idea of authorship, or intention, and instead trying to open yourself to whatever will flow through you.

Steve: Matt has been playing much longer than I have, so he has a more fluid and refined approach. He also uses a fingerpicking technique involving, I think, all the fingers on his picking hand, which provides a nice counterpoint to my three finger Fahey-style picking and creates some interesting patterns in arpeggiation. I’d say he also is greatly skilled at composition, I lean on being improvisatory partially due to my lack of technical skill and partially because I love happy accidents. Matt has a great solo set you should check out here that really showcases his talent (including his excellent singing voice!). Also, since I’m not as adept (I also injured my picking hand and can’t really pick anymore), I use pedals a lot, not in a ‘tone quest’ fashion, but to explore texture and time. Delays are my favorite. And in keeping with my punk roots, I also like to get aggressively noisy.

About half the tracks on the record are composed, usually one of us would have the root of an idea or a completed piece, then either teach the other an accompanying part, or we would compose something over what the other had written. A good segment of the record was also cut from long improvisational sessions, usually centered around some root progression or mode before meandering to some far-flung places.

Can you share some further words where the album was recorded and produced?

Steve: We are not gearheads, and in fact I only finally recorded in an actual studio just a few months ago. As much of this music was recorded on a lark, not much prep went into setting up an “ideal studio environment.” We basically would set up in a basement, a living room, someone’s bedroom, wherever we worked at the moment. This allowed us a degree of freedom and spontaneity that you can’t get in a studio. We also didn’t really have the money for quality equipment so improvised setups such as taping a mic to a broken guitar stand were commonplace, along with using a roommate’s old high school budget model Line 6 Spider amp (which had an atrocious/awesome-sounding setting called “insane mode” on the distortion setting).

The only tracks that I would say entailed an actual “session” were the opener, ‘In the Bramble,’ and the closer, ‘Changes’. Recording also took place over many years, spanning material from 2015 to 2022. As far as production, Matt is a wizard with Ableton and he really made the material shine while still retaining its lo-fi origins. The music I like to make is sort of mid-fi. I like to hear the sounds of the room, a chair creaking, equipment malfunctioning in an interesting way, and a dog barking in the yard. We also routed a ton of tracks through a Roland Space Echo, (the one piece of expensive equipment) either live or after tracking. I’m sure Matt will say more about that, the Space Echo is his baby.

Matt: Several tracks on the album, like ‘Blue Stockings,’ ‘Two Last Names,’ ‘JGPT,’ and the three tracks cut from an afternoon session I mentioned before were the product of us sitting in a room together, improvising and feeding off of each other. And then some other tracks, like ‘In the Bramble,’ ‘Gut Check,’ ‘The Man Who Owned the Sky,’ or ‘Nokomis Special’ were more carefully composed, and, in the case of the latter two, recorded in pieces with plenty of overdubs. ‘The Man Who Owned the Sky’ in particular was recorded entirely remotely. Steve originally recorded the entire acoustic guitar part in a single take, I think primarily as a way to sketch an idea down, and he sent it to me thinking we could maybe use it as a demo or something. And I was really taken with its weird structure and constantly changing odd meter, and decided to just try and use it as the base for a fully fleshed out/arranged song, so I added a bunch of overdubs onto it. It ended up becoming this huge sprawling mess. I think it’s kind of an outlier on the record, which on average is much more sparse.

You can probably tell from listening that we’re into the sound of tape. A lot of it was tracked on an old stereo reel to reel, and any weird, ethereal sounds or textures you hear are likely the product of my aforementioned Space Echo tape delay. That thing is a finicky but magical little box that sometimes seems to have its own will, and probably deserves to be listed as a third contributor.

<a href="https://slowclarity.bandcamp.com/album/holding-pattern">Holding Pattern by Slow Clarity</a>

We can hear both of you on Palmer’s ‘Useful Histories,’ do you feel that Slow Clarity is a continuation of that in a way?

Steve: Slow Clarity is a predecessor, really. The styles are greatly different, though. While I would describe both releases as “psychedelic,” ‘Useful Histories’ is far more electronic and propulsive. ‘Holding Pattern’ is defined, in my opinion, by the intertwining arpeggiation I mentioned above. That’s why the title fits and part of why we chose it. Once we would get locked into some kind of incomprehensible pattern while improvising that one could never necessarily write, we would lean into it and explore the possibilities and variations within.

Matt: As Steve mentioned, this record was largely recorded before ‘Useful Histories’ came out. Probably the real successor of ‘Useful Histories’ is the band Steve and I both play in Cassini. Originally we put that band together as a full-band vehicle for some of Steve’s songs from ‘Useful Histories’ and ‘Unblinking Sun’ (the name itself came from his track Cassini), but it quickly evolved into something bigger than that.

One other thing about this album and its relation to Steve’s previous solo music: One of the tracks on ‘Holding Pattern’ is a reimagination of one of Steve’s old solo guitar pieces, under a different name. I won’t spoil which one.

What’s next for you?

Matt: I’ve got a backlog of solo guitar music that I’ve been meaning to record for a while, so at some point I’m planning on putting out a solo record. But in the meantime, I really want to follow up this Slow Clarity release, and we’ve got plenty in the can that just needs to be sorted through and mixed.

Steve: We’re trawling through the TONS of already-recorded stuff in the Slow Clarity archives to produce a follow-up, hopefully soon. We also have an LP on the horizon with our other project, Cassini, which is a full band. That’s coming out on Echodelick! We’re pumped.

Do you have any opportunities to play some live shows these days?

Steve: I moved from the Twin Cities to Portland, Oregon last fall, however I am planning a visit back to Minnesota this summer and it’s likely we’ll play a show. Slow Clarity reunion! Presale starts, uhhh… next month. We are not guilty of any dynamic pricing scams, that’s all Ticketmaster. Take it up with them. We also maybe, maybe will have a small tour of the upper Pacific Northwest this fall.

Matt: In lieu of playing more Slow Clarity shows while we’re living in different states, I have some solo guitar shows set up this summer in town. But it will be interesting to see what we come up with after having not played together for a while when Steve comes to town again this summer.

What have you been listening to lately? Tell us about some new albums you found lately.

Matt: I’ve really been loving the new record from Elijah McLaughlin Ensemble lately. I admire his ability to sculpt ambience into a sprawling composition, and I think he’s pushing fingerpicking guitar music into interesting and unique places.

My good friend Mark Verdin and his brothers wrote/recorded/released an album entirely in the month of february as part of some kind of National Novel Writing Month type of challenge but for music, and I think the results are spectacular. It’s called ‘Field Guide to the Seven Spheres’.

I also recently discovered this English brother duo called Woo that’s just really uncategorizable stuff. In particular they have a record that I think was originally recorded in the 80s and reissued recently called ‘It’s Cozy Inside’. It’s almost like Animal Collective’s ‘Sung Tongs’ at parts, but it’s really out on its own limb.

Steve: I am not quite sure how to explain this, I think it had something to do with COVID lockdown and isolation, but my music listening habits have really cooled down. There is this Onion article titled “Lifelong Love Affair With Music Ends At Age 35” I always think of which really burns:

“When I was 22, I felt I needed to find out who was out there and experiment with all different kinds of music,” Powers said. “But I just don’t have the stamina for that now. I can’t muster up the energy to seek it out anymore. I’d rather just listen to the bands I already know. If that, even.”

I’m hoping to change this, but I am not trying to force it. If anyone relates to this, leave a comment so I don’t feel so weird about it. I can’t be alone, can I?

When it comes to playing, who are some of the most important guitarists in your life and why?

Matt: We must mention our guitar icons Vincent le Manse and Bertrand Porquet. Steve and I discovered them right around the time we started writing and recording the earliest bits of ‘Holding Pattern,’ and I’m not ashamed to say that we tried our very hardest to completely rip them off. I don’t think we have the skill to truly do so though, so I don’t think we have any lawsuits on the horizon.

Also, one of my favorite hometown (Minneapolis) players John Saint Pelvyn continues to amaze me with what he can do with a guitar (and sometimes voice). He’s one of those players who you can identify the second you hear a note, from his deep idiosyncrasy. Steve and I are planning on playing a very belated Holding Pattern release show with him in Minneapolis this summer, and maybe some more shows later this year in the Pacific Northwest.

Thanks for taking your time to discuss Slow Clarity. Last words are yours.

Steve: I just want to mention that I woke up to the news today that Kevin McFadin of Sunrise Ocean Bender passed away unexpectedly, it was devastating to hear [Editors note: interview was conducted April 26th 2023]. He was a true champion of oddball music and even if I didn’t know him as well as others, I could immediately tell he was a true mensch once we started work on ‘Useful Histories’. I am immensely grateful for having known him, he changed my life, and judging from the reaction I’ve seen to the news, many others. My thoughts go out to his family.

Klemen Breznikar

Slow Clarity Bandcamp
Matt Beachey Instagram
Steve Palmer Facebook / Instagram / Bandcamp
Ramble Records Official Website / Facebook / Instagram / Bandcamp / YouTube
Echodelic Records Official Website / Facebook / Instagram / Bandcamp