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Black Gold

MusicBlog

Location: Brooklyn, NY

Website: http://www.myspace.com/blackgold

Bio: The first time that Eric Ronick and Than Luu—the multi-instrumentalists who make up the nucleus of the New York City based Black Gold—played together was ... (more) on the set of the Craig Kilborn show. After the act with which they’d both been touring finished their sound-check, they stuck around and struck oil. “It was like a secret jam,” Luu says. “Very secret,” Ronick agrees. “I had a Wurlitzer set up, and Than was on the kit, and it was great.”

That auspicious if slightly unusual start proved to be emblematic for the band: Though they resist referring to themselves as “professional musicians”, Ronick and Luu have each, separately, logged significant stage time with such groups as Ambulance LTD, Panic! At The Disco, M. Ward, The Boredoms and Adam Franklin of Swervedriver; and they wrote and recorded the bulk of their forthcoming debut, Rush, in Ronick’s Brooklyn studio during intermittent breaks from their other musical commitments. “It was totally organic,” Luu says. “Whenever we had some time off, whether it was a few days or a couple of weeks, we would just write, and we just built the record that way, song by song, track by track.”

Indeed, despite their busy schedules, both Luu (who remembers “using my mom’s chopsticks to bang on pots and pans” as a child in California) and Ronick (who “begged” for piano lessons “at the youngest age possible”) have felt, from the beginning, that their collaboration as Black Gold is something uniquely special and significant. “The very first time that we went into Eric’s studio together, we ended up writing and recording the song ‘Run’ in just a few hours,” Luu recalls. “We listened back to what we’d done at the end of the night and realized, ‘This really works!’” Ronick says, “Writing that song with Than was a defining moment.’”

That soaring (and, ultimately, richly-layered) piece prefigured what would become, as Ronick puts it, “the essential principle behind how we write our songs. It always starts with nothing but our voices, a piano, and an acoustic guitar. Each song must be the best song, at its core, before we’ll bring in the production and the orchestration and the instrumentation.” Album opener “Detroit” is another example, featuring, as Luu says, “some cool drum machine instrumentation and analog synthesizer stuff.” Furthermore, Luu notes that the experience of listening to the entire album in order approximates a kind of reversal of the process: “It starts off more produced and dance-y, but it evolves into a more organic sound, just a band playing drums, guitar, piano, and singing. The last song, ‘After the Flood,’ is just Eric on the piano, nothing else.”

Musical inspiration is drawn, according to the pair, from practically the entire history of recorded music: “There is no style or genre that’s off limits,” Ronick says. “We get a real kick out of taking from different artists, different periods, and putting our spin on it, and somehow we ended up with something cohesive and that sounds, undeniably, like us.” Luu says, “If you listen, you’ll hear some stuff from the 1930’s, a lot of rock and psychedelic influences from the 1960’s and 1970’s, but you’ll also hear some contemporaries who we’re listening to like Hot Chip.” Lyrics are equally important: “Each song has a story to it,” Luu explains. “‘After the Flood’ speaks to relationships in general, while ‘Shine’ is more about faith and love.” “Plans And Reveries,” according to Ronick, is “about the moment when you come to and realize what you’ve lost, what you had, and what you don’t have any more. We don’t like to be overly specific because we’re really interested in having the listener kind of invent their own narrative.”

Nevertheless, the group hopes to eventually produce a video for each song and to link them together to make one entire movie which will be a visual realization of the story that the album tells musically.

When performing live, Luu and Ronick are currently joined on stage by a guitarist and bass player. And though Black Gold is still relatively young as a touring band, the group has already played some fairly unbelievable gigs. “The third show that we ever played, we opened for Panic! in front of 10,000 people. It was crazy,” Luu says, but Ronick quickly corrects him. “What was really crazy,” he insists, “was that it was 10,000 people who didn’t know anything about us, and we had no experience playing live together, and we still rocked it. We rocked the shit out of it.” (less)