our everyday environment, our mac Ibooks, Ableton Live, the human body, mimosas
Sounds Like
Gestalt composes loungey, electronic pop music featuring live instrumentation and sequences. Our typical set up includes 2 Mac computers running Ableton Live, guitars, keyboards, a vibraphone, a drumset, and vocals running though our board. The sound ranges from lush soundscapes to pensive pop, to bumping electro and back again. In the past few years, we have performed with bands such as:
Kind of Like Spitting
The Album Leaf
The Black Heart Procession
Julie Doiren
Le Savvy Fav
Gestalt is music composed, recorded, and performed by Jeff Johnson and Cory Gilbert in Orlando, Florida. They are joined onstage and in the studio by Phil Hammil. This band was formed in 2001 and features former members of Song of Mercury and current members of the Ocean Floor.
Gestalt means a combination of elements so unified that the whole exceeds the sum of its parts. Rarely is such a winning solution found betwixt the chilly layers of electronic music. Gestalt reawakens the human side that a whole genre forgot. This machine is manned.
You are invited to listen between the lines. Wistful, pensive ballads dot the album, set in mechanized nests of creative loops and live recording. Here is wood and brass and strings. The solid drumming is a syncopated calamity, almost a freestanding statement. Clever musical choices imply a hidden game of hide-and-seek for poetic double-meanings.
At first listen, Human Resources is a bricolage of the sounds on hand. This is music to think to, to work to, to excitedly pound out whatever it is that you make. It evokes the pathos and satisfaction of childhood discovery. There are parts here to anticipate during each listening. Gestalt is both ethereal and thoughtful, and relies on your sense of dialogue.
I miss those guys and you too, kim.
pain is a way of knowing life,
it truly was a gestalt, bigger than all of us.
it will always be one of the major things I can look back on and be truly proud and humbled to have been a part of.
Nothing like waking a naked phil up passed out on the floor on a sunday morning for practice, stopping on the way to jeffs house for some sparks. Sweating on computers and drumsets, and kite flying fieldtrips.
the other day i realized how much i miss gestalt and all that goes with memories of going to your shows. it all felt new. i dont even really know corey but i miss him picking phil up for practice. gestalt shows always made me happy.
dont laugh, but shapeshifter makes me cry. haha! (i can laugh)
and the neighbors in love one…sooooo cute, especially now that ive been told what inspired it :)))
