24 Nov 23rd–Nov 29th, 2023 phoenixnewtimes.com phoenix new Times | NEWS | FEATURE | FOOD & DRINK | ARTS & CULTURE | MUSIC | CONCERTS | CANNABIS | It Takes Two Body of Light ride the line between the personal and the transcendent. BY CHRIS COPLAN P hoenix’s Body of Light are seemingly obsessed with duality. There’s two brothers (Alex and Andrew Jarson), two sets of instruments and gear, two writing styles and an interest in sounds both organic and artificial. It’s hard to argue with the results: The brothers Jarson have forged a compelling blend of pop and darkwave across a suite of projects and albums. (The pair helped co-found the Ascetic House collective, and have contributed to projects like Mundo, Blue Krishna and Somali Extract.) Choice, it would seem, is overrated. “We don’t necessarily like to say we have a specific genre or anything,” Andrew Jarson says. “Not to do the whole reflection analogy, but every album is like a mirror. We’re trying to figure out every layer of ourselves and trying to expand on the past. Every album is looking back and then trying to see how we can progress forward in a new and exciting way. That’s exciting to ourselves mostly, but also hopefully the fans will think the same.” Adds Alex Jarson, “I think the context is always important to what’s going on in the world, and how people are feeling and how the culture is changing. And I think every album, you have to look at the context and how things have changed so rapidly in the world. We sort of mimic that as well.” While it’s a tendency that’s played out across their entire career — the band have been going steady since the early 2010s — it’s especially true of their latest album, the recently released “Bitter Reflection.” The band’s perpetual shifting and bounding between ideas gave them some novel opportunities to really explore. “[2016’s “Let Me Go”] was like a reintro- duction of us,” Andrew says. “And then this one, it’s us circling back to that in a way where it’s like a reintroduction, but it’s also got that kind of romantic sensibility that that album had, too. Whereas ‘Time to Kill’ was a lot more just like electric and a little more like sardonic and fun and dark.” Yet amid that ceaseless evolution, the band retain a few basic qualities. No matter the idea or sentiment they’re chasing, it’s always about authenticity and purpose. “But for us, it’s really based on feeling and emotion,” Alex says. “And also there is the technical aspect of like, what gear are we going to use? Like, do we want to keep using this synthesizer or do we want to try to expand and use other gear from different eras? We just blend all of those things together, and it just comes out the way it does.” It’s ultimately about using the tools they have available and striking some balance in the name of whatever feels most interesting. “This [album], we wrote it in a very human way,” Andrew says. “There’s some meticulously programmed stuff for sure, and we programmed a lot of it using some pretty ancient gear and really old software from the mid-’80s. We approached it in this way where a lot of it was really hand- played. A lot of it was recorded in and kept there, like after the first time it was recorded. So it’s really and deeply human compared to our last stuff, which some- times could be really mechanical and tech- nical on purpose.” Part of that process was bucking their own process across previous records, and embracing something else. “On ‘Time to Kill,’ or really all of our other records, we replaced a lot of our synths with other things,” Andrew says. “But on this one, we didn’t do that much replacing, and we really just added other stuff on.” He goes on to add that “they’re super nostalgic sounds. There’s a lot of referential sounds that aren’t very specific, but we definitely utilize them pretty subliminally. They’re not directly referential.” Luckily, the Jarsons weren’t alone in this entire process, as they’d enlisted producer Josh Eustis of the band Telefon Tel Aviv. “[Eustis] was really delicate,” Andrew says. “And the way that he produces is really awesome. He ended up shaping the songs and just polishing them by adding these really minimal things. He would call it ‘putting crystals’ on it and just making them shinier. It made them completely different songs.” Yet Eustis’s presence really was more of a guide; the Jarson brothers used the bulk of “Bitter Reflection” as a deeper explora- tion of their lives, their many creative changes and what it all truly means. “This whole album is like a look back for us, at least for me, during COVID. I was re-examining my life; I think a lot of people were,” Alex says. “And it was a lot of unconscious effort of replaying memories and then just remembering how things used to be and how they are now and just trying to figure everything out. I think even with getting Josh to help do the record, it sort of fits in that category, too.” Rather than try and make a kind of concept album, which wouldn’t have felt authentic, the brothers instead decided to use their genre-based explorations as a foundation for creating the record’s narra- tive arc. “We started to know how it was going to turn out when it was being sequenced,” Andrew says. “We tried to tell a story musi- cally and in terms of the genres we explore in each song. It’s like we’re hand-holding in the beginning and then it’s like, ‘Well, we’re going to throw something new at you.’ And that was definitely the point. I think if we went into it heavy-handed and had a full-on concept, it wouldn’t land in the right way.” Alex adds, “You just got to commit to a process and you keep trying to understand what the process is telling you. And it usually has a meaning, and you can pick that out. Toward the end, it starts to become a little bit more obvious. And so for those ambient tracks, which break up the album, we weren’t even sure if those were going to go on the record. But once we had the songs ready, they just fit so perfectly.” Ultimately, as evidenced by an album standout like “Fortia,” it was a story about the brothers themselves. “We’ve sampled whole movies and stuff. But here we got to use our memories as instruments in a way,” Andrew says. “Like, there’s so much subliminal stuff in there that really only we know what it is. And so it’s really cool in that regard. There’s Alex singing at 6 years old hidden in there, and it went with the track perfectly. So it was one of those things where it’s just a trip, and we can bring it full circle in a personal way.” Alex says, “[The songs] had so much of us in them. They have home movies and memories in there. People in our lives who aren’t in our lives “Bitter Reflection,” the new album from Body of Light, is out now. (Photo by Andrew Jarson and Peter Shikany) ▼ Music >> p 26
