Listening to the expansive modular, analog synthesizer music that the duo creates on The Days of Mars evokes the early electronic music of the seventies, as created by pioneers like Terry Riley, Klaus Schültze, Vangelis, with a crucial difference: Delia and Gavin's intuition and interaction are the defining feature of the sound. Just don't be too quick to label them as yin-yang, masculine-feminine dualities at play. "While we are playing these roles of male-female," Delia explains, "it's more humanistic than gender-based." Gavin extrapolates further: "Our separate identities get blurry really fast. In the music especially, it channels some sort of 'life energy' that makes distinctions irrelevant. In our experiences and research, this energy is really a fundamental and natural part of being a person — probably being anything — and being here in this world." The world glimpsed on The Days of Mars is an incredibly vivid one. Touching upon their love of everything from Alice Coltrane to acid-house, Santeria ritual music to the kosmiche side of krautrock, opener "Rise" draws on these touchstones while remaining true to Delia and Gavin's mesmerizing sound; repetitious sinewaves ripple and undulate to achieve a heightened state of awareness. "Black Spring" pulses and builds like a climax to a long-lost horror flick (think zombies or a post-apocalyptic world). And the two are at work on a short film for the epic, expansive third track, "Relevee," though it's easy to imagine your own movie when listening to its swirls and arpeggiations.
"Since everything we do is theatrical, our music becomes like a soundtrack," Delia explains, and it should be noted that the pair are fans of a wide spectrum of cinema. From Italian horror to Czech new wave, psychedelic Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky to Hollywood musical maestro Busby Berkeley, these films influence their sound as much as any musician. Visually inclined, Gavin also sees "a definite landscape aspect to the music. When I'm playing, there's this sensation of traveling over previously un-glimpsed topography." Plateaus and vistas emerge in the contours of the music, but it's not just strange terrain, as Delia reveals: "At the time of Days, there were a lot of things that I wanted to express but couldn't put into words." Such an emotional core centers the fluctuating peaks as well as the more languid and ambient tracks like "13 Moons." Floating through such fertile soundscapes, one easily enters into a dreamlike state. "We really wanted to create something that was an experience to listen to, a spiritual experience that took you somewhere," Gavin says and Delia adds: "We see it as a world that you can enter and explore. When we play, the music puts us in a place where we're really receptive and open to inspiration, and we'd like that sensation to arise in our listeners."
Delia and Gavin both verify that the vibrations of this synthesized music give rise to new visual information, fueling new ideas for their art. But don't think that their music career is somehow separated from their visual work. "We see everything as one," Delia makes clear. "Everything we're doing now, in these performances, this ongoing project, it directly goes back to when we first met." To which Gavin finishes: "We feel that the music, the performance, the art, it's all one thing, creating this new world." Let The Days of Mars both book and soundtrack your trip to such a destination.
Protection - we do a lot of it these days. Sun cream for our skin, sunglasses for our eyes, condoms for you know where - but do you remember to protect your hearing?
Click to find all the information you need to look after your hearing now so you can enjoy music for years to come
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