The Fat Angel Sings

Gemma Thompson, perhaps best known for her work in British rock band Savages, is one of the most inventive guitarists of her generation. In performance, she can be seen wrestling her instrument with the kind of looseness that comes from having complete faith in her ability; her style is a delicate tangle of feedback, reverb, and ostinato. In Savages, her guitar leads are threaded together with her bandmates on bass, vocal, and drums to form structured rock ‘n’ roll songs. But her most recent experiments with sound have freed her from those constraints.

In a studio and at her apartment in Leipzig, Germany this past summer, Thompson spent several months experimenting with different guitar frequencies, with the goal of letting the sounds lead the songwriting. She wanted to find an audible way to describe landscapes, using the way it travels to represent different physical formations: cliffs, rocks, waves. The results of these experiments, recorded with her partner Sam Sherry of the band A Dead Forest Index, are presented as four unique compositions, written as complementary to one another. They offer a journey into the mind of an artist who’s passionate about finding new ways to interpret sound.

For Bashan—EP1, Thompson took cues from several projects she’d recorded with Savages, as well as a film score she was asked to record for a documentary about Dennis Hopper. Using those as a launching pad, she set about to create something she wanted to listen to, that also reflected her desire to expand the scope of her work.

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