Room tone: You gotta have it. For reference, for post-production, as an insurance policy, as an engineering ritual — if you’re producing an audio recording for just about any purpose, you need access to the sound of the room where the recording was made, all by itself. The sound of the space, which can be beautiful all on its own, is one of the things that makes recorded music magical. While the ability to produce tracks “inside the box” — with nary an instrument pushing air — opens up lots of creative avenues, often computer-based productions are missing this very special ingredient.
Thayer Sarrano’s new record Ancient Future — which she’ll self-release Friday and celebrate with shows Thursday at The 5 Spot and Friday in Georgia — is a welcome respite from our overly algorithmic moment. Sarrano, a singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist whose laundry list of credits includes work with Cracker and Of Montreal, splits her time between Athens, Ga., Nashville and the road. Accompanied by drummer Marlon Patton, steel player Matt “Pistol” Stoessel and guitarist Rick Lollar, she headed into the countryside an hour or so from Athens in September 2020 to work on Ancient Future.
“We went to this place called Gypsy Farm, which is in Lavonia,” says Sarrano. “I had heard about it from friends in Elf Power and my pedal-steel player’s band. They had recorded there and said it was just amazing. It used to be a country music venue. … There were posters everywhere still, it looked very untouched. [Laughs] It was, like, Johnny Cash and Dolly Parton and George and Tammy and stuff. The auditorium chairs — where they had people’s names taped to them, like, all yellow — and then this huge stage. So it was like, ‘Oh, what a great place.’”
Ancient Future has a profound sense of place, which happens to be in the far reaches of the galaxy. It makes sense that Sarrano’s portal to the edge of space is in the woods near the border between Georgia and South Carolina. Self-funded at a time when gigs were scarce and prospects bleak, Ancient Future is very much a product of quarantine restrictions, but nothing about it feels defined by the pandemic. The overarching need for human connection that marked those months of lockdown resulted in an album as fluid and vital as a mountain stream.
“[Stoessel and Lollar] both kind of found out that Marlon and I were going up there and were like, ‘Can we come?’” Serrano recalls with a laugh. “I was like, ‘Yeah, you know, there’s no budget here, but you’re welcome to come.’ And they’re like, ‘I’m so bored, I get outta the house.’ We were just gonna get drum sounds, and I told them, ‘Here’s how a song goes, play whatever you want. Maybe we get some vibey sounds.’ And they’re, like, miking the bleachers, and just getting all these crazy room sounds. Then we ended up tracking the whole record that day, kinda by accident.”
Ancient Future is an expansive and organic album on which the character of the room and the character of the people playing in it contribute to the experience. From the opening swell of “Both Sides of the Door” to the final chimes of “Right Here Instead,” Sarrano and her crew approach the concept of psychedelic rock as pranayama breathing exercise, pulling deep into themselves and exhaling a cosmos of sounds. There’s the intimacy of an inner journey and all the electricity of a rock band in a big room.
On the instrumental title track, Sarrano creates a melodic structure suited for Panavision, cinematic in scope and ready-made to let her bandmates run wild. It’s a 15-minute adventure through sweeping vistas and taut improvisation, roaming through dark canyons and cresting awe-inspiring peaks. It’s rare that a track of such epic length feels so focused and so free simultaneously, but Sarrano is a deft director who brings the best out of herself, her environment and her colleagues.
“In the past, maybe I wouldn’t have done something like that,” she says. “We’re in this beautiful room, why would we not just, you know, try to see what happens. Like, there’s absolutely no pressure. … I felt so connected to the songs — the way they had come, and them being these positive things.”
What comes across is a joyful celebration of sharing a space with people you care about, listening together and responding together. You might be able to approximate lots of the individual sounds with advanced technology, but the method of creation can’t really be replicated without humans together in a room.
“I wanted that [positivity] to be what I was sharing, especially when things were just so horrible and all these dark times. This is the love I want to be out there. And I just have to get it out there.”
She says with a laugh, “It was just, like, ‘We will make this exist.’”
