Scott Gilmore's New Album Is the Colorful Work of a True Tinkerer

Scott Gilmore calls his native Los Angeles “a city of homebodies,” but his new album was born when he got out of the house. While staying in a small hotel on vacation, he bashed out the basic structure of a track on a sampler. He named the song, and then the album it gave rise to, after the space in which he made it: Two Roomed Motel.

“I’ve always found cheap motels to be alluring,” he told Noisey over email. “The non-descript artwork, the writing desk, a pen and paper in the night stand drawer—they possess an aesthetic which appears like the shapes of life, while still remaining utterly void of that which they are attempting to represent. It is a unique emptiness which I find to be existentially beautiful. The room is completely empty, there is no meaning, [and] you must fill it yourself with whatever you choose. And when you’re gone, it will be as if you were never there.”

It’s a feeling that’s hard to put into words, one not dissimilar from the feelings he conjures with colorful, dizzy instrumentals he’s been releasing under his own name over the last few years. They’ve most often been wordless, looping instrumentals, which means that there is this void of meaning at the center of them, a place for you to rest whatever feelings you bring to it. When I listen to his music, I hear joy, playfulness, silliness—an unrestrained quality that echoes both great experimentalists like Vini Reilly and basement-pop freaks like R. Stevie Moore. But Gilmore gently reminds me that all that’s just stuff I’m bringing to his sounds—fun isn’t a part of the equation to him.

“It’s not very important for me to have fun, and that’s never my goal when I’m in the studio,” he says. “That’s not to say that I don’t really enjoy the process of recording. I love working in the studio, and I feel a sense of creative freedom when I’m there. It’s not quite like having fun, but it could be this excitement and a genuine love for what I’m doing that comes through to some ears as ‘lighthearted.’”

Gilmore says that what drives this record, and his music in general, is “a process of exploration.” He arrives at the studio clear-headed, with no plan and no expectations, keen to let the sounds dictate where a given piece might go. In the past, that’s meant a proliferation of wonderfully meandering pieces—loping jams that felt more about the journey than the destination. Two Roomed Motel feels different though. The songs are still shimmery and diffuse—open and welcoming like those motel rooms— but the loose song particles have condensed into something a bit more song-shaped, a little more fully furnished.

In part, that’s because of Gilmore’s voice. It showed up subtly on some of his previous records, but here, he allows himself borderline pop turns, from the dazed Ariel Pink-isms of “Empty Aisles,” to the vocoded drone on “All Our Stuff.” It adds a bit of humanity to his wispy music, but Gilmore downplays the degree to which it’s shifted his music.

“It isn’t that vocal music allows me to access something that instrumental music cannot,” he says. “To think of it in such a way implies some lacking on the part of instrumental music. When I listen to a song, I’m not actively listening to the voice. Whether I like a song depends on the chord changes, the melodies, the instrumentation and the production.”

Gilmore presents himself as the latest in a long line of studio loners, totally consumed by the process and impervious to the reception. But even on the songs where Gilmore gives the foreground to his synthesis, there’s something more lyrical about these pieces. The melodies that he traces are bright and memorable, like a floral pattern stamped out on a duvet cover. Still, that doesn’t we can expect more of the same on the next record.

“I have way too many influences to ever feel as though I’ve fully actualized my musical vision,” he says. “Every song is an opportunity to try something different—a new sound or an unfamiliar chord progression or melody. It’s always a reevaluation.”

Scott Gilmore's Two Roomed Motel is out March 1 on Crammed Discs. It's available for pre-order now and you can listen to the whole thing up above.