Already known for impressively looping tasty guitar licks over some dangerous polyrhythms, Plural’s latest video shows off their skills with a live performance of their new single, “Row Bought Liar.”
Recorded at Trevor DeSouza’s Hatchet Lake studio, the duo pull off the auditory equivalent of patting your head while rubbing your tummy as they ambitiously perform acoustic arithmetic. Syncing Alex Warthell’s drumming to Matthew Schwartz’s guitar they build up a loop for the ‘A’ part of the piece and then reverse that same loop, pivoting the result as the foundation for part ‘B’.
Performed entirely as an instrumental, rather than pulling the song’s title from some nuanced lyrical theme Schwartz says that “Row Bought Lair” was named, in part, after some curious dance moves they had witnessed at a festival.
“Our song names usually reference either how I was feeling at the time of writing it or just some silly mad-gab word combination to tag the song with due to the lack of lyrics,” says Matthew Schwartz. “‘Row Bought Lair’ is a bit of a reference to the robotic feel during the first few layers of looping.
“When we played Festival inspire a year ago, Alex mentioned he caught some people dancing sort of robotically to it as well, that definitely solidified it in my mind!
“I always enjoy instrumental music for giving the listener more control over how they perceive what the sound is making them feel rather than hearing words that evoke that emotion. I hope that in that sense we can be more relevant worldwide when listeners in other countries hear us for the first time.
Schwartz notes that while all of Plural’s music relies on looping, layering the same patterns over themselves in half-time and playing off of the resulting rhythms, “Row Bought Lair” gets based on a series of 3-note patterns that are repeated at varying speeds. Schwartz says the technique means there’s room left between the loops to play around in.
“I think that’s where Alex’s drumming comes to play,” says Schwartz. “The songs without drums are an entirely different trance-like experience. I love playing around with odd time signatures quite a bit. But when Alex writes his parts, he finds the groove so well.
Alex Wrathell, in turn, says that his drumming approach means putting the “odd phrases” of Schwartz’s guitar loops, and moulding them into a beat that feels natural to most listeners using rhythmic patterns, layers of time signatures or polyrhythmic ideas.
“With the right beats landing in the right places, it can be pretty danceable, and the layers of melodic loops moving around the drums can be pretty entrancing,” says Wrathell.
With a certain inherent complexity involved, the two had to ensure that the music could be performed not just on the recording, but live as well. Obviously, the new video for “Row Bought Lair” puts that concern to rest.
“The performance is just as important to me as the music,” says Schwartz, s”o having the videos for people to see that it really is just the two of us producing all of the sounds without a computer for sampling or backing tracks. It’s just another part of what makes us an exciting act.”
Plural’s new album, Trip Key, is set to be released on November 2, 2020.