Photo Credit: Joe Kirschling
Cairns’ new Cluttered Sky EP splits its 28 minutes almost equally between two iterations of the band. Drenched in a haze of guitar and saxophones, a pair of dream-pop tracks open the EP with the dramatic gust of some of Broken Social Scene’s most memorable work. They’re washed out but lush and vaguely shoegazey, which is about what you’d expect from songs recorded and mixed by Kevin Dixon of Brief Candles.
The EP’s other four songs date back a bit, though. More overtly lo-fi than those opening tracks, they’re ambient-leaning solo recordings that the band’s primary songwriter, John Larkin, tracked a couple of summers ago during a fit of productivity when he was holed up with a broken foot. “I definitely lean toward the lo-fi, tape noise sort of sound, just because I like it, but I’m not really aiming for it,” Larkin says. “It’s just a byproduct of my means. I don’t really think too much about the production quality just because it’s going to sound how it turns out. I just want it to sound the best I can.”
Larkin says his home recording setup usually involves a four-track tape recorder, but he also sometimes records using a VHS cassette player. “I just do single track stuff, so it’s just an acoustic guitar, which goes through the mixer, then that goes through the tape player, and then I’ll play that back onto my computer and mix it,” he explains. “I think I’m starting to move toward sounds that are more hi-fi, but back then, I didn’t have a nice interface for my computer. But it definitely creates a sound that I like a little more. It’s a little warmer, I think, even though it’s kind of a pain to set up. It takes twice as long, basically.”
The EP’s opening tracks are better representative of the more ambitious, more collaborative, newer directions that the band has taken. Even as it peaks and swells, introducing one twist and turn after another, the EP’s eight-minute standout, “Atmosphere,” has the loose, jazzy feel of a jam session. “That one we wrote collaboratively, and it just turned into this long, long thing,” Larkin says. “We did one take for that one. We actually played it wrong, but we left it; there were a few transitional things that we didn’t do right, but I guess it doesn’t matter, because no one else would know. It’s also a little longer than it should be, because we played some parts longer than we intended to.”
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During their short run, Cairns has kept a fairly low profile, which combined with the members’ many other commitments can give the band the feel of a side project (members also play in bands Calliope and Gauss, and two of them, Caley Conway and D’Amato, lead solo projects). Even Larkin splits his time across several bands, but he pushes back against the perception that Cairns is a side project. “I feel like we get portrayed that way,” he say. “I think it just probably looks like that because we all have our own projects. But we still practice once a week, and at least for me, this is my main thing. Some people might think of us as a side project, but it never seems like that to me.”
Cairns’ Cluttered Sky is streaming at cairnsmke.bandcamp.com.
