Revisiting ‘Love Touched Time and Time Began to Sweat’ with Pool Holograph
Pool Holograph (PH) makes art rock on the path towards enlightenment. Beginning over a decade ago as the bedroom recording project of singer-guitarist Wyatt Grant, Pool Holograph slowly transformed into a fully realized band with the addition of Zach Stuckmann on bass and Chicago indie mainstays the Stolz brothers, Jake and Paul, on drums and guitar respectively. Pool Holograph’s sound lives and thrives in a delicate state of balance. The creative tension between Grant and the newer members of the band cultivates a kind of irresistible friction in their songs, where what is played is just as important as what isn’t.
The band’s newest release, 2020’s Love Touched Time and Time Began to Sweat, finds the different pieces and players that makeup Pool Holograph’s sound in perfect harmony. The LP establishes solid footing somewhere between the band’s ear for melody and their taste for noise. On standout track “Medieval Heart,” the band’s knack at weaving hypnotic guitar lines into catchy post-punk is on full display. But it's on the next cut “Life By the Power Plant” where Pool Holograph seems the most fully developed. Guitars washed out in reverb decay over a whirling backdrop of feedback which seamlessly transitions into the ambient noise of the following track “In a Mist.” It’s here that Pool Holograph is at their best, fusing together the concrete and the abstract into something that is uniquely their own.
We caught up with the Pool Holograph guys for a quick Q&A sesh, covering their newest LP and the state of the band. Read our Q&A with PH below, and listen to them on Spotify and Apple Music.
Hey guys! Thanks for catching up with us. To start things off, we were really blown away by the ability of the band to balance bursts of feedback and passages that are almost ambient with a really tight song structure. Without giving away too much of the secret formula, what kind of unorthodox production techniques were you guys using on Love Touched Time and Time Began to Sweat?
Wyatt: Thanks so much! I think the “balance” comes from most of our work having simple structures that can be built upon in various ways. Through practicing and performing the songs, they start to gain their own layered “abstract” features, like a loop or guitar texture. For example, “In a Mist”, a kind of ambient track on Love Touched Time, is based on what we usually performed live after “Life by the Power Plant”.
I often think of our songwriting to be naturally uncomplicated, but we have a major interest in noise/ abstract elements infiltrating them and helping the story.
We saw that you posted about The Chill’s Kaleidoscope World, Pylon and Flying Nun being a point of inspiration for Love Touched Time and Time Began to Sweat. Could you expand on that a little bit?
Wyatt: Kaleidoscope World is a great album and Zach and I were into that “Pink Frost” song for a while when we were first getting into writing together. The multi-layered structure and patterning were so cool all while being kinda lonesome and cool. On another level, I liked the name of the album and referenced it with “Transparent World”, our previous album, and “Mirror World”, a track on Love Touched Time. Music-wise they were not a huge influence on us, but it was one of those bands that opened the flood gates of “art rock” for me.
Pylon and the Clean have been pretty consistent influences in our band. The Clean always seemed very true and not precious about their medium, similarly, Pylon’s music is quite disarming while having a kind of levity.. or “grace” might be a better word.
Jacob: I’ve always been quite inspired by Hamish Kilgour, the drummer of The Clean. Sometimes you hear someone play the same instrument as you, and you feel a real connection to them. Of course I’ll never be as good as Hamish but his drumming style makes so much sense to me.
A lot of your songs use really simple parts, often taking advantage of negative space just as much as what’s actually being played. How do you go about the writing process (especially now that you’ve expanded from a solo project to a full band) while managing to keep the “less is more” mentality?
Wyatt: We’ve had a tendency to be “reductive” in our process in the last couple of years. We saw early on that, especially in recording, obscuring the forms in the song and adding a lot of reverb and delay made things feel less intentional. When you’re working with simple parts and sounds, the most gentle inflections make more of a difference, along with presenting a language of their own. I think that’s going to be something we explore in our next album as well.
How did the collaborations on the album with V.V. Lightbody and Spencer from REZN come about and what was it like working with them?
Wyatt: Both Spencer and Vivian are music friends that have had big influences on us. I was writing the demos for “Asleep in Spain” and thought to myself “Vivian would sing this a lot better” when I was going for smoky, gliding vocals. Likewise, Spencer’s contribution to “August Outline” made the song “come true”.
What did you guys think of the Pitchfork review comparing you to “c. ‘07-’10 Deerhunter”?
Paul: I give the comparison a 4.2/10
Wyatt: I don’t think it’s a huge stretch influence-wise. I’ve been a big Deerhunter fan since I was 15 or so and their music blog made a big impression on me as I began my music journey as a young adult. Especially since they were from the "southern indie rock scene" like Jay Reatard, Black Lips, the Balkans, etc. All that being said, I'd hope that people would hear our music and draw their own conclusion on how we sound. We get compared to Wipers, Broadcast, and the Fall when we play live.
Could you explain the meaning behind the album’s title and give a bit of context about what drew you there?
Wyatt: Sure! While we were in the thick of writing the album, and around when my fiance and I decided we were going to move to Asheville, the band + two of our partners got into a bad hit and run accident on our way home from playing at Coles. It was very fucked up, and messed with each of us. Personally, I hit a depressive spot and I needed some help spiritually so I listened to a lot of Ram Dass lectures. In one of the lectures, he was reading a story from the Bhagavad Gita where Time, this grim reaper figure, tries to conquer Ravana, the demon king that represents Love, and drive him to eternal darkness, saying how everything is ephemeral and will waste away. But Ravana basically called their bluff and conquered Time. “Love Touched Time and Time Began to Sweat” really resonated with me for many reasons. I was searching for continuity and was afraid to leave my friends in Chicago, and reminded me that things would be ok. In addition, “Time” having some kind of physical quality was very attractive to me and somehow felt like a cool backdrop for an album.
What town is “Life By The Power Plant” about? How do you think the different backgrounds of the group’s members come together to create PH’s sound?
Wyatt: “Life by the Power Plant” is loosely based on where I grew up in Memphis, TN. It’s not a literal power plant, just a “plato’s cave”-ish allegory about small town America. Memphis had, and still has a big influence on my contribution to Pool Holograph. I try to make my demo style kind of kind of Alex Chilton and Carl Perkins-esque.
How did the pandemic affect the roll-out of the new LP? Did you guys have a tour booked already behind it? Overall how would you say that the band has adapted to the circumstances?
Paul: The pandemic hit right as we were getting back our final mixes from Dave and starting to think about how to release it. We did shop it around a bit but everyone was so uncertain about the future state of the music world and the world in general that it didn’t get a whole lot of traction. We were already leaning towards self-releasing the record, since we have such a supportive network of artists around us and Jake and Clare were already releasing music through Sunroom. In the end I think we made the right decision because we got the agency to control all aspects of the album and it is still ‘ours’.
This is the second album that you recorded with Dave Vettraino as your producer. How did that relationship start and what brought you back?
Jacob: Paul and I had worked with Dave on some Varsity recordings, and I floated the idea to have him mix the Mortals LP during one of the early Varsity sessions. He was into the Pool Holograph recordings and agreed to mix Mortals in the original Public House studio in his basement. We returned to record the Town Quarry EP, live tracking everything, and it was just a magical experience. Dave is the best- always pays fine attention to detail and works with bands to get everything they want out of their recordings. He creates a great environment for us to work in, we all became friends and so it’s become the natural decision to record with him.
Any new music in the works?
Wyatt: I’ve been demoing a lot recently and Jake and I just did our first collab demo in a while. Really excited about all of us getting play together again <3
You guys stay really busy with PH, your other bands and creative ventures outside of music. I was wondering how you guys find a balance between your various other projects and PH? Also, anything new to look forward to on any of those fronts?
Wyatt: It’s cool because while the band is only one facet of creativity, we have a very natural way of advancing the material together over time no matter how busy it gets.
Jacob: Pool Holograph has been really important to all of us and so it’s easy to make time for things that are important to you. That said, we all manage to stay quite busy with other things. Paul and I have an album coming out with our new collaborative project Central Heat Exchange this year. Also, Wyatt and Sunroom are working together on a zine for an art show of his this summer!