Interview with August and Masen of Glacier Flower on their new album “Glacier Flower ‘21”

On May 14th, 2021, my good friend and podcast-mate August, and his creative partner Masen, released their third album as the ambient duo Glacier Flower, a Nebraska-based project that has been restlessly experimental and creatively diverse in their records since the inception of the band in 2018. The new album is titled Glacier Flower ’21, and follows their 2020 sophomore effort fittingly titled Glacier Flower ’20. I sat down with both August and Masen to discuss the record, their musical influences and creative process, and everything listeners should know about the project and its sound.

TYLER: First of all, I want to congratulate you both on finishing your third album, on having three albums for starters, which is impressive, and for the fact that I think your new album is really great. How did the two of you get started making music initially? What was the genesis of Glacier Flower?

AUGUST: It’s really the stupidest story. One day, after high school, sophomore year, we said “hey we should do a music thing together.”

MASEN: We had a project, which was basically just some off brand Filthy Frank shit. It was the worst kind of music.

A: It was called ‘Nirvana The Band’.

M: And then somehow we decided, you know what, let’s not do this anymore. And we tried making some psychedelic rock stuff, but that didn’t work out either. Basically, we tried making a psychedelic rock song, and it ended up being part of The End Of, the song on that first album, and from there we just ended up piecing that album together.

A: That’s a pretty good description of what happened. It started as an almost Pink Floyd type of thing, which was a band we were both pretty big into, and then it grew out of that into an ambient electronic project.

So, basically, there was no initial impulse, at the beginning like “let’s be an ambient duo”. That was something that just evolved out of what was and wasn’t working for you?

M: We started work on that song, and then I had the picture of the first album cover, and I’m pretty sure that day it just came into existence.

At what point did you come up with the name ‘Glacier Flower’?

A: *laughs* You gotta tell him about this.

M: Okay, so, as we were trying to figure out our new name, I went onto a Random Name Generator to try to get ideas, and of course, Glacier Flower appeared, and we were like “you know what? That’s good enough”, and we kept it.

I reckon that probably more bands than would be comfortable admitting it in the last ten years probably have had a similar experience of “what the fuck do we call ourselves? Let’s just go to a band name generator”.

A: Yeah, it’s a part of the creative process that is just so much harder than you’re led on to believe, because what word or words do you use to describe everything you’re doing?

Especially because it’s the first thing that people encounter, right? Before they hear your music, they know what the band and the album is called. That’s why I think I understand, though I’d like to hear more from you both on this, the simplicity of your approach to packaging your records, the albums being self-titled, this very straightforward thing that doesn’t necessarily try to reveal or give listeners any particular expectation for what they’re about to hear.

A: There’s one specific artist I can credit that to, where I got that idea. It’s the artist Global Communication, another ambient group, and they had a record that was just titled 76:14, which was just the runtime of the album, and I remember saying to Masen, “this is the stupidest thing”, and then Masen eventually was like “no, I kind of like that”, and I grew on that idea and I guess that evolved into us just doing “Glacier Flower ‘20”, “Glacier Flower ‘21”, and so on.

To give you credit, you do take it a little further than Global Communication. I’m pretty sure all the song titles on that record are just the lengths of the tracks, whereas you guys actually came up with titles, which is one step further.

M: I just feel it’s stupid to have all your songs completely untitled and the album untitled, it’s kind of lazy I think.

There’s a balance you have to find, I guess, between not wanting to be completely nondescript, but also not wanting to completely tell the listener what emotion they have to experience while listening to the song, either.

At this point, we’ve talked about how Glacier Flower came to be, and its origins being rooted in your experiments with psychedelic rock. Obviously you can’t really hear any of that in the actual music of Glacier Flower, but in terms of inspirations I would like to dig into some of the influences on the two of you as ambient musicians. In those early days of the first record, what were some of the musical reference points that were guiding you as you decided to make an ambient record?

A: I think both of us were fairly big into Brian Eno, like Ambients 1–4 were all records we had heard a fair number of times. I don’t think that’s necessarily an influence you can hear in the sound of that early record; it was more just communicating to us the idea that we could do this kind of music, we could make something like that, that we didn’t need someone shouting words every five seconds.

M: For me, at least, I was just making music to make music. I was never thinking “I want to make a song that’s inspired by this person” or whatever, I was just doing what I wanted, and then I kind of realized what our music was becoming. And obviously, that second album, we can credit a lot more to specific inspiration points.

A: Yeah, that first album was really just being thrown into the deep end without any kind of guide to what you’re doing.

Let’s dig more into your creative process, then. What has that been like, for the two of you, in terms of actually putting music together, particularly in those early days when you were just getting started?

A: The way I break up our career is this: the first album and the song A Grand Journey Across the Synth Landscape is the first phase, and then the rest of ’20 and onwards is the more modern Glacier Flower. That earlier era was really just “let’s make this synthesizer tone on a DAW like Garageband” or like, whatever free software we could get, and just see how it sounds. It was a lot of trial-and-error, really.

M: And then for a lot of it, we didn’t really have a mindset of where a song was gonna go, or how it was going to sound. With that first album, if we thought the synthesizer sounded good we just added it. We basically recorded everything if it sounded okay to us at the time. Obviously since ’20 that has changed a lot, and we’ve added more structure to our songs.

A: Another good point about that early stuff is that we wouldn’t carry an idea throughout a whole song, it would just be “let’s put this here, and then drop it out and do something else.” A Grand Journey is when we started to transition from that to more broader song structure.

There is a real hypnotic quality to that as a closing track that does work as a nice comedown from the rest of the album. So, am I to interpret that A Grand Journey Across the Synth Landscape came earlier than the other songs on Glacier Flower ‘20?

M: Yeah. It took five months to get to it, but once we started on it the rest of the album was a breeze.

A: It’s really hard to understate the importance of that song. It was really the change in the water for us.

The natural segue, then, to build on this question: beyond that point, how did your creative process shift, and how has your creative process evolved to the point where you’ve produced this new record?

M: Finding what we were going to do for the second record was hard, because we had so many different ideas, and once we finally settled down and made that record, we knew the sound we wanted to go for, and how we were going to expand on that sound, add more of an emotional feel to it. So in a sense there wasn’t a clear discussion from the beginning of what this new album was going to be, we just started making stuff. We already had a clear idea what we wanted right from the end of the production of the last one.

A: When we were finishing ’20, Covid was really starting to hit the US, and at that point, we were getting to a mindset where things were becoming worse and worse in the world, and that was the impetus for what would become ’21. And, a bit more on ’20: it’s really, as Masen says, just having a specific artist we liked and wanting to do something not necessarily the same but similar to them. Hiroshi, the opener on that album, is a direct send-up to an artist we both really like, Hiroshi Yoshimura, and it was that kind of nature/ambient thing that was driving us on that album.

There’s definitely a real organic sound and quality to that record. Particularly on tracks like Hiroshi, it does feel very warm. However, that contrasts in a pretty stark way with this new record. Obviously ’20 was a pretty big shift from the first record, which as you’ve said was just playing around and putting together sounds that sound good. With ’20 you moved toward fully forming something that flows as this one cohesive experience from start to finish, but ’21, in my estimation, is almost an even bigger shift from the record that precedes it. ’20 was colourful and pretty and texturally varied, but this new one is denser, darker, frequently quite disarming in how straightforwardly beautiful it can be, so I’m curious to hear more about how this record came about and how you feel it sits in relation to your previous work?

A: The first song that had really been made for the record, even though we didn’t initially intend it to be on the record, was the track Like I’m Not Even There. But this song was made closer to around the time Honestly was made for the last album, so those tracks happened in conjunction as I like to think of it. A lot of what informed Glacier Flower ’21 was going back and listening to that mood and that tone that we’d created previously but just really didn’t fit with what was going on on ’20, and then turning that into a whole album.

M: We had taken a break, and we were discussing what we would do, and obviously we listened to that song about 5 or 10 times and we were like “yeah, we should probably start working on an album with this kind of tone”. The production of ’21 for both of us was horrendous. Most of the album that you hear is made by either me or August in isolation, because we couldn’t always go and work on things together because of the pandemic.

A: Yeah, and we also just have other things we’ve had to attend to, way more than we have had in previous years.

So am I to take from that that the previous records were more collaborative in the sense that the two of you were working in tandem on stuff together, whereas the pandemic meant that that approach wasn’t something you could use for this record, or something that wasn’t as accessible?

A: For the most part, yeah, I would say so.

M: Not having both of us work on the record made it really hard for us to stay in a creative mindset, because it took us… at one point, like six months to make a song, and we had this… spiralling time, where there was just no creative process at all, and we’d have to wait months to work on a song or hear a song from the other person.

A: It was really a problem from September to December of 2020. That was when it was at its worst, and we were just really failing to generate ideas and get the ball rolling. Obviously by that time we had made songs like Silva, which is one of two collaborative songs on the record, and it was just the time away which really started to beat down on the both of us, and it just dried up the wells of creativity.

M: I think we made more than half the album in the last five months, compared to what we did when we first started back in fall and winter.

That’s interesting, because that kind of creative stasis, that brick-wall that artists do often hit at certain points… the feeling of that is reflected in the darkness of the sound of the record. But ironically that sense of stillness is what gives the record so much of its power. For instance, I think of the opening track on the record, which is one of my favourite pieces that the two of you have made… it’s this very placid, but also creepy drone that just iterates itself… it feels like it’s kind of breathing, for 9 minutes straight, and it feels like you’re drifting through the ether, and even though it’s so minimal and there’s virtually no perceptible change happening throughout it, it sets a tone that I think the rest of the record builds on. So perhaps Glacier Flower ’21 is an instance where that kind of creative stasis can fuel a feeling in an album that ends up making its own kind of statement.

A: I’d absolutely agree, and I think Masen and I have both talked about this, how that void was necessary to making the record what it was, but it’s also at the same time something you’d never want to do again, because the time you spend in that stasis is just miserable, it’s like the worst feeling ever.

M: It was really bad, because it was like… you would go months being like “I wanna make something and I can’t,” and the other person would be like “oh I have a song made”, and then you’d have to wait however long… but, I will say that even though this was some of the worst production experience we’ve had, personally, and August agrees, these are some of the best songs that we have made so far, and some of them are probably some of the better ones that we will make going forward too.

I’ve kind of already touched on this, but I just want to dig a little bit deeper. This is quite plainly a very forlorn and sad record, and we’ve touched on some of the behind-the-scenes influences that might have driven that, but it’s also something that comes across in the track titles and also in the monochromatic album art. I’m curious about the decision to adopt such a darker aesthetic in those respects, especially considering how colourful your last record was.

A: I think there was just something between the two of us where we were like, “okay we’ve had our really colourful records, now we wanna do something that’s more emotionally hard-hitting, and distinct from everything else we’ve done”, so putting that in black-and-white really does accentuate that.

M: I agree. With that sound and everything… I personally feel that having a blank black-and-white adds more effect and impact to sounds, compared to having some generic colourful image.

I got to see both of the different album covers that the two of you were deciding between, and I think they are both interesting in what they evoke similarly and differently. The cover you didn’t go with was this image of this big black void, which is quite evocative and you can hear that in the record as well, but I’ve come to really appreciate the cover you did choose, which is this bright white image that’s overexposed, and you can barely make out what might be happening on this album cover, it’s very formless, and I think it sets a mood in an effective way too. It’s certainly the most disarming and attention-grabbing album cover that you’ve had yet.

M: Yeah, that was made with an AI generated thing. Fall of last year I started getting into [The Caretaker’s album] Everywhere at the End of Time, that whole project, and the conceptual ideas behind it, and particularly the visual art, where the picture can depict what it’s like to have a stroke, and how that was created with AI. So I got interested in that, and we both started working with it, and then there was one image that we felt was cool, and that ended up being our cover.

I find it interesting to hear that the inspiration was art that pictures decay or destruction, because that is a feeling that I get listening to this record, is that constant sense of something decaying, falling apart, breaking away… a lostness, I guess.

A: Another interesting thing that I think accentuates that origin is that initially the image did look a fair bit sharper, but Masen did something on his phone where he brightened it up and made it look even fuzzier than it already was.

It looks really good now. Another obvious thing that immediately jumps out when I look at this record, especially in relation to your other two, is that this record is considerably longer than anything else you’ve released; it’s almost twice the length of your two previous records. Was this a shift that you knew you wanted to make for this project as it was starting to form, or did it just end up happening as these pieces you were making made more sense to be drawn out?

M: Kind of both, but more the latter. We kind of knew that we wanted to make something longer, because we both look at ’20 and we kind of think that we could have added more to it. Obviously it works great as it is, but I think we both wanted a longer album anyway, and we knew it was going to happen eventually. And also, how the songs sound and the certain tone we wanted, we needed to make them longer to really sustain that feeling.

A: Absolutely. The original version of Beyond the Postcard Beaches was like, four and a half minutes long, and it didn’t work at all. You still had the intended tone, but that piece being extended to nine minutes really allowed what that song is going for to come to fruition. I think even if we didn’t set out to make the hour-long record, it would have happened naturally anyway.

There’s a thing that I think is often misunderstood about drone music in particular, which is to do with the nature and usefulness of repetition. There’s obviously an inherent critical belief that usually is well-founded in music that if you’re gonna use repetition it needs to be for a purpose, and it can sometimes end up making some music sound lazy or half-formed. But in ambient and drone music it’s different, the repetition and stasis is part of the point, part of the immersion of the experience. And that immersion is robbed when you don’t have that, and that’s something that people who don’t listen to a lot of ambient and drone music don’t always understand.

August when I was listening to this track I kept thinking about the discussion we had when we reviewed Microphones in 2020, and how not everyone was able to get fully on board with the use of repetition on that record and what it added to that experience, and I think that the same principle applies to some of the more spacious and still moments of this record, as well.

A: Yeah, I would obviously absolutely agree, and it’s kind of interesting you mention that because I would have never thought of Microphones in 2020 as being anything near what influenced a lot of the purposeful decisions on this record, but I think it’s an interesting way in which tastes cross over, now that you point it out.

As another aside, a question I had in my head a couple of minutes ago, for August: obviously you and I and our friends have been doing a music podcast for very close to a year now, and one of the very first things that we reviewed was Glacier Flower ’20, and as an open question I want to ask: do you feel that the experience of having to critically think about music on a weekly basis in a very intensive way has influenced your creative process as a musician?

A: I don’t know really, I guess what I’ve always come back to, and Masen would attest to this because he’s known me for a majority of my life, and the fact that I’ve always been an incredibly critical person with regard to art. But I think it’s possible that honing in on music criticism specifically has made me have a higher level of scrutiny toward what goes into the music I make, for sure.

I think it’s reflected, and this is something that should be attributed to both of you, but the real purposefulness that’s inherent in every musical decision made on your records, especially the last two. When a sound is introduced, it has a sense of place in the mix, and it feels very much like your music is put together meticulously and every sound is there for a reason, which is obviously a good artistic approach that all good artists have.

M: Probably the reason that we’re like that now is because we’re both very critical of that first record we made, and if we like the sound, we just recorded something from it and added it to the mix, and obviously that’s not a good approach.

And there’s obviously in this new record and the last one to an extent, there’s a clear consideration of not just whether a musical idea sounds good, but how it relates to whatever else is happening in the song, and how it meshes with that or adds to it. And that’s one of my favourite things about the longer pieces in the middle of this album, where you have quite a substantial development across the runtime of these pieces, but because of their slow-moving nature you don’t necessarily realize the first few times you listen to them how much is actually happening and changing.

A: I think a lot of that can once again be tied back to that song Like I’m Not Even There, how it was really the first thing we attempted in that vein, I’d say, and it’s through that song’s evolution that, and I can’t speak for Masen because obviously he did a lot of solo songs himself, but there’s definitely a lot more songs on this record where we’re using that trick, and that development. I’ll name two that Masen did as examples, those being Hour of Matins and Until We Meet Again.

Some of those longer tracks reminded me of that ambient Eno stuff you mentioned earlier, funnily enough. Like I’m Not Even There at points made me think of Ambient 4, and the darkness of that record, and then tracks like Until We Meet Again and Tristitia Ex Nihilo have a brightness to them that reminded me of the Apollo Soundtracks.

Just as another side-note as well for August: when I interviewed our friend Saoirse for her most recent album, one of the things that she said to me that stuck out in my memory was that being on a music podcast and then releasing a record feels like you have to “put your money where your mouth is”, and that’s an interesting perspective. I suppose a lot of people who work in music criticism or enjoy analyzing music in that way do end up making something themselves.

A: At least for myself, what I’ve always figured is that… I’ve never really taken that too much into consideration myself, mainly because I think a lot of the music we review is so different from what Glacier Flower ends up being that, that is just my perspective on that kind of music, whereas someone who is a consumer of primarily Phoebe Bridgers-type indie rock might not tend to be the person who would immediately gravitate toward these long, slow songs. I almost see it as separate worlds, in a sense.

We’ve touched a lot on the new record and the creative process, and so the last question I’m left with is do the two of you have any thoughts on the future of Glacier Flower, where you might want to move to next?

M: No, we really don’t know.

A: Masen and I have talked this over, but I guess we just really don’t want to rush into the next thing, and I think that since high school is ending, we’re both just in the mindset that we might want to take some time off from this whole music business, especially since making the last record you have to put yourself in such a dour headspace that I think we both just need time out of that. Which is not to suggest that we would never want to make music again as Glacier Flower, because we most definitely will.

M: The question of when we are going to is what’s up in the air. Who knows? I guess we’ll see what happens.

Congratulations again to both of you on a great record.

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You can stream and download Glacier Flower ’21 on Glacier Flower’s Bandcamp here: https://glacierflowerofficial.bandcamp.com/album/glacier-flower-21