Lexicon Magazine #16 Ganymede article

by David Richards

We’re in a car headed to the Summer Synthpop Festival at the Black Cat in Washington D.C., and Patrick and David -- a.k.a. Ganymede -- have just come into town to see the show. Get these two talking about the mid ’80s, and you might want to change your plans for the evening.

"I think a crowning moment of my life is when my mom took me to see ‘Baby - Secret of the Lost Legend’ in 1985," said Pat.

David and Patrick are fans of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s the way only people too young to have actually lived through the period are. "The aesthetic of that time is something very special and it left a deep, deep impression,” Pat said. “There was always something better on the horizon, technology was going to solve all our problems, and -- best of all -- the opportunities for geeks from the suburbs were limitless."

“I'm a huge fan of Russell Mulcahy, the guy who did Highlander," said David. "I was looking at a Duran Duran video collection one day when I was in high school and realized he had directed many of their videos, so I bought the tape. After watching the videos a couple of times, I began to notice the music and realized that I really liked it too." David spent his spare time catching up, getting his hands on as many classic synthpop albums as he could.

Of course, the good times didn’t last.

"Suddenly, I looked around and the theater I saw ‘Baby’ and ‘Explorers’ in was getting torn down and replaced by a budget gas station," Pat said. "The mom and pop video store I grew up in closed down. Atrocities like ‘Armageddon’ made $200 million at the box office and the Pet Shop Boys were doing things like ‘Bilingual.’ As Neil said on that album, ‘Time was running out; something had to be done.’"

As we approach the Black Cat, I notice Pat has on an Adidas T-Shirt and a pair of parachute pants. "You don’t know how hard it is to find a good pair of parachute pants these days," he says.

Dave and Pat, both Pennsylvanians, had met in college in Los Angeles and decided it would be cool to record some music together.

"We wrote material back and forth and realized we may have enough for an album," said Pat. But by the end of college, the two were living far apart, making any collaboration difficult.

"Pat went to do Teach For America in New Orleans. He told me that he had gotten a guy who had a recording studio to give him some inexpensive time. So I went down there, we already had everything programmed and ready to go; we knew we just needed a day or two to lay down a master," said David.

"We get to the studio, which was out on the bayou, and the guy had a really nice set-up, but not too much of a clue on how to use the equipment. Pretty soon, his friends were coming over, lighting up joints and generally having a good old time. Anyway, he did something wrong at the end of the first day and erased everything we had done. The next day we started over, but at the end of the day, something happened and we lost everything again. That was a rough time, almost the end of Ganymede."

David and Pat decided to start over and rely less on programming and more on what might be termed manual triggering. Dave: "Most of what you hear was played into the computer, very little programming, and mostly on analog equipment. Pat is kind of a nut about finding authentic old analog keyboards."

After the Fall is an attempt by the duo to make what might be termed intelligent synthpop. "Sometimes the lyrics in synthpop can get kind of silly; we tried to make them meaningful and interesting," Dave said.

"Needlessly complex electronica wears you out; it makes you unable to appreciate the expressive quality of the music and turns the whole enterprise into a murky wash of digital noise punctuated by vocal silliness," Pat said. "Overproduction is a crutch for vacuous music. The best songs have minimalist tendencies, as well as lyrical concepts that fit the music and reverberate beyond the song itself."

David lives in Los Angeles and works as an editorial assistant in the film industry. Patrick is pursuing his master’s degree in journalism at Berkeley.

The band is already in progress on their new album, as Pat says: "It took a long time to set the first one up, hopefully things will move a bit faster now." They are also doing some remixes and working on putting together a live show.

"We’re trying to do something a little different, where we can bring the excitement of analog synths to the stage and do an electronic show that’s not canned. It’ll be complicated to put on, but definitely something to see," Pat says. "And I’m continuing my ongoing tryouts for the Ganymede back-up dancers.

Before the second day of the Synthpop Festival, Dave and Pat stopped by a local video close-out shop and snapped up several mid-'80s B-movies like "Revenge of the Ninja" and "Exterminator 2" in the classic clamshell gray MGM boxes. It was a good couple of days.