A little over a year ago, I interviewed long-running instrumental band Stem Afternoon about their then-new debut album, Bandit from Beyond. Talking with multi-instrumentalist and producer Clint Niosi, drummer Mykyl Garcia, guitarist James Velasco, and, via speakerphone, DJ FTDub at Orange Otter Studio, Niosi’s home base, we touched on film scores and dub reggae, trip-hop and surf rock, and how instrumental music, even when it seems like it’s floating away into the land of the Cosmic Nod due to endless jamming, still suggests a narrative moment.
As I drove away, I remember thinking that Bandit’s story — transmitted through hazy, reverberating guitar textures and hypnotic rhythmic patterns — seemed to evoke a Spaghetti Western on a faraway moon.
Now, Stem Afternoon has released the follow-up to Bandit from Beyond. Another digital long-player exploring the possibilities inherent to lengthy jams and the sonic gauze unspooled from FX-laden, sci-fi guitarscapes, woozy, bewildered samples, and the crack of a snare with an ocean of reverb spilled over it, Seminary Gates will sound on point with Stem Afternoon’s dub- and trip-hop-influenced sound. But where he only contributed keyboards to the last record, Niosi is present on both electric and lap steel guitars, helping Garcia and FTDub crystalize a moody atmosphere that suggests you listen deeper and deeper lest you miss some vital piece of information. It’s like watching a single-take wide-angle shot in a horror movie, peering into its shadows to find where the killer or monster is hiding.
Niosi, who also tracked, mixed, and mastered the seven tracks, took over guitar duties from Velasco, who left after Bandit’s completion. The two have a similar aesthetic — the jangly influences of Sergio Leone, Dick Dale, and Nick Cave are a few places the two guitarists’ styles overlap — which makes for a lot of sonic continuity between the two albums, as does Garcia’s drumming. But to this project, they added a bassist. Denton’s Cyrus Haskell has played in a variety of indie rock bands such as The Future Home, Svarga Loca, and Mom as a Teenager, and here, his style — one that leans into melodic flourishes without losing the gravity endemic to dubby bass runs — pairs well with Garcia’s dreamlike, splashy percussion, carrying the wooshing, scribbling confusion of FTDub’s scratches and samples across space and time like a freighter bound for the end of the universe.
The band spent about six months working out the basic ideas of these songs before tracking them at Orange Otter in May. Other than a few guitar and trumpet overdubs, nearly all of Seminary Gates was recorded live, including album closer “Sweet Medicine,” recorded “on the fly,” Niosi said, “as we had some extra time.” Funnily enough, it sounds the least “jammy,” using a repeated guitar figure and a brisk, propulsive trip-hop beat to anchor the swirl and pulse of FTDub’s space-out noises. To put it in the context of Stem Afternoon’s cinematic aspirations, “Sweet Medicine” has major end-credits energy, but long before you come to that point, the journey is just as good as the destination.
Beginning with the rattling tambourine and minor-key, cosmic-Western guitar chords of album opener “The Land that Law Forgot,” the album might be identifiable as a direct sequel to its predecessor, but as it segues into the funky strut of “Tokyo Punk Station,” you can tell there’s an element of humor lurking beneath Stem Afternoon’s usual foreboding climate. “Cosmos Kaos” shrouds the listener in a fog of distorted, whispering noise until a sunny, major-key guitar lick rises above the confusion like a starship escaping a particularly cloudy planet.
Whatever film is inside the heads of Stem Afternoon’s members, their music’s open-ended quality paints endless horizons for the listener’s imagination. They let the songs breathe and sigh, exploring emotional landscapes that flow and spread like afternoon shadows over a garden, the kind of music that’s made for long walks on cold days and aimless drives at dusk. With each listen, you’re bound to hear a new texture you might have missed before. It’s the kind of album that kindly asks you to pay attention, to let its sonics help you form a picture in your own head. Whether that story takes place on the moon or closer to home is up to you, but with Stem Afternoon as your guide, meditative music such as this is great for your cosmic soul.
