Atomic Unit’s Creative Fusion

A conversation with the Vancouver - Portland duo

BTS recently caught up with Atomic Unit’s David Sherwin and Haig Armen to talk about their new album Then and Now and to ask about the creative process that keeps their music fresh and helps them overcome the 500 km that separates them from their home bases in Portland and Vancouver.

Listen on spotify here

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

BTS: You live in different cities and record remotely. What is the process for how you both work together to create an album?

David:  Each of us sketches song ideas which are captured in Ableton and shared online. If Haig shares some guitar or synth licks, and I hear something I find interesting then I will record something else in response to that piece. It’s like the exquisite corpse technique, and leads to all kinds of unanticipated twists and turns along a narrative.

Haig: Sometimes I think a song will go in a particular way, but the musical idea David responds with is different than what I had intended, and I end up liking it. In this way we move out of our individual comfort zones.

Rusty Road is about driving on a dirt road probably through some farmland and tuning the radio between stations.

Fast Travel is like the music that comes up when you’re playing a sci-fi role-playing video game where you can pull up the screen to fast travel from one location to another.

Haig: Sci fi is a common theme in a lot of what we play. Future 76 explores a nostalgia for how we thought about the future back in the ’80s. The synths and rhythm section recall the days of new wave. This is how we would have scored a 1980s sci-fi film.

Toujours is a love theme from an ancient French film that doesn’t exist. I imagined it  as something that could have spawned Emannuel, or some other ’70s French erotic movie.

David: Unlike how we made our previous records, on this album we are playing songs through in complete takes. We wanted the album to feel like a band playing fresh songs live. There are many guitar solos, basslines and drum performances that were first or second takes.

BTS: You are both multi-instrumentalists. Is there an overlap in skillsets? How do you decide who does what?

Haig: Dave is a trained drummer, and I am a trained guitarist, so we gravitate towards our comfort zones, but it really depends. On Future 76 I programmed the drums but David took it over and added in live drums. 

On Rusty Road David demoed the Rhodes part, drums, and some ambient electric guitars, and I responded to that with a synth bass line, rhythm guitars and the solo that carries through the song. 

David: In our live video conferencing sessions we’ll both have our guitars or keyboards in front of us and one person will play a part while the other person acts as producer. Our playing styles do blend together at a certain point so it’s not always clear who is playing what.   

BTS: You fuse so many styles together in a cohesive way on Then and Now. Was this an intentional approach?

David: We started off by thinking we’d make an ambient record, and wrote a lot of material that was pure ambient or electronic music, but along the way we found ourselves following our interest of incorporating strong melodies and backbeats with genre and musical styles becoming secondary considerations. 

Instrumental music allows us to go from post-rock to ambient to electronic, to cinematic, to americana, to jazz.

Haig: Liminal is the last tune on the album and is the outlier. It's a dark and ominous ambient soundscape that ends with a sense of optimism. It’s a nice bookend for this release and perhaps a quick glimpse as to what might follow. We have enough material for an ambient record as our next release.  

BTS: Some of the songs have a really distinctive sound design. How do you achieve that on this record?

David: We recorded, mixed, and mastered the project ourselves. We’re both really conscious of the sonic spaces occupied by instruments and working on carving out distinct zones for the instruments to breathe.

It helps that Haig builds his own effects and amplifiers, and we both have a set of our own hand-made pedals that we play through. That gives a unique character to a lot of the guitar tones.

When we use virtual instruments or amps, we pick sounds that are deliberately old and have a patina. The Rhodes instrument is sampled off a real Rhodes piano that’s rusted out, and other piano sounds are sampled off a 100-year-old piano where some of the hammers have worn down.

BTS: Who are some of your influences on this release?

Haig and David’s playlist:

Some standouts that influenced us for this particular release:

Vangelis’s Blade Runner Blues & Ending Theme to Blade Runner: There’s something so raw, emotive, and orchestral about his body of work, and we found ourselves listening to his soundtracks and soaking up the kinds of sounds he could create with synthesizers. The synths on Future 76 and Liminal definitely have a hint of this.

Jon Hopkins: His records Singularity and Immunity were in rotation and influenced a bit of how we approached our use of synthesizers and drum machine for tracks such as The Getaway and Toujours.

Tortoise: They have really expressive drumming (with two drummers) and their bass and guitar lead lines are incredibly distinctive. You can hear a bit of this in how we approached songs such as Evaporated and Fast Travel. 

Pat Metheny and John Scofield: Then & Now is our closest track on this disc to jazz, and are definitely in the zone of Metheny and Scofield.

Jeff Beck: Rusty Road was an ode to Jeff Beck, especially his songs such as Cause We’ve Ended as Lovers.

Glass Beams: David got a bit obsessed with this band, as a power trio they have an incredibly hypnotic groove that doesn’t wear out on repeated listens. Willow Tree has a similar vibe.

BTS: Do you have any live dates planned?

Haig: We’ve done some rehearsals in Vancouver and hope to play later live later this year.   

It might be just the two of us, or we may bring on another musician so there’s not too much switching of instruments. We want to create a live, cohesive soundtrack.

Thanks for reading and listening.

–sandy