Gilded Bio
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Gilded is a new musical project featuring West Australian experimental musicians Matt Rösner and Adam Trainer. Matt Rösner is arguably one of Western Australia’s most renowned experimental musicians. Based in Myalup in the South West, Matt has released music on labels as diverse as Room40, 12K, Apestaartje, Meupe and Miatera, with a musical focus on guitar and field recordings. Adam Trainer was a founding member of Perth post-rock outfit Radarmaker, and has also played in experimental projects such as Polaroid Ghost and the Ghost of 29 Megacycles. In solo guise he has released music on labels such as hellosQuare, New Weird Australia, Phantom Channel and Feral Media. Adam’s solo work has sought to locate textural nuance alongside dislocated melody.
The title of Gilded’s debut album Terrane comes from a geological formation that has become dislocated from its original position and sutured onto a new landscape. It retains its own distinctive form and contrasts against those around it, whilst also finding a new place, a new home. The album was conceived during two consecutive autumns in Western Australia. The compositions that make up this record strike at the heart of how it feels to be in a period of transition, of watching a subtle change, a shift in texture. There are moments of quietude and reflection held together by the austere and alternately punctuated by shifts toward the uplifting and revelatory. One thing is certain: change is inevitable. We leave traces and will not return.
The inception of the record occurred in March 2010, with the recording of a 50-minute piano improvisation in a room overlooking Perth’s skyline. The piano recording sat on the shelf for 12 months: a period of contemplation. It would later become the backbone of five of the nine tracks on the record. Convening in autumn 2011 in Matt’s home studio at Myalup Beach, layers of instrumental melodies, percussion, vocals and field recordings were set against the original piano sketches, turning what was once improvised into a structured cinematic whole. The sessions in Myalup also gave rise to four new works inspired by the surroundings, and complementing the record’s textural theme. These new pieces often contrasted the unbound structure of the original compositions with rhythm and repetition. They brought a sense of focus and precision to the record’s preoccupation with texture, and directed its melodic tendencies towards more structured and restrained forms. The resulting record is one of contrasts the liquidity of thought against the permanence of physicality, changing landscapes against the constancy of creative purpose.
