Tetrix have a few new tricks up their sleeves in their psych-country single and video Every House Has A Light On — premiering exclusively on Tinnitist.
After 16 albums for the Calgary-based duo, Connor Gottfried and Neil Pockett have managed to further experiment with experimental, delivering a fresh, original sound that fuses the essence of old-time country with modern psychedelic music.
“Think ‘Hank Williams on acid’ or ‘melted accordion Kraftwerk,’ ” Gottfried details of their release by the same name, Every House Has A Light On. “For this album, we wanted to connect vintage country chord progressions and accordion with analog drum machines and avant-garde editing. Each song was recorded as an extended 20 to 30-minute improv session which was then chopped and edited using Ableton Live into the final arrangement heard on the album.”
The results are as intriguing as they sound, and lands as a sonic gold star for the pair of skateboarding outsiders of sorts growing up in small-town Manitoba during the ’90s. “We were surrounded by old-time country music but drawn to the punk, grunge, and electronic sounds of the outside world,” Gottfried continues. “In the early 2000’s, and after moving to Calgary, we formed Tetrix with a focus on genre-mashing improvised jazz, psychedelic, electronica, pop, noise, and punk, all run through a cutting-edge, computerized editing process.”
Experimental by nature, Gottfried and Pockett began playing around with various analog instruments like pedal steel and sitar. It was a fateful 2015-era purchase, however, that revealed the sound you hear today: A vintage Italian accordion.
“We’ve been using a fully improvised process throughout our time as a band and find it produces fresh interesting patterns and novel changes,” Gottfried reflects. “For this album, we primarily used that vintage Italian accordion and an Arturia Drumbrute, along with various hardware synthesizers and effects processors — including a vocoder to introduce de-pitching noise effects on the vocal tracks. Our aim was to try and bring the beauty of the classic country chord progressions and the rich tonality of the accordion into the context of 21st century electronic music.”
Check out Every House Has A Light On above.
