A Fun Journey

For more than 20 years now Philadelphian trippers Bardo Pond have been peddling their distinctive brand of spacey, drug-inspired psychedelia – hypnotic, meandering sonic explorations, their dense drones dripping with reverb and distortion and slathered with white noise, augmented by the world-weary vocals of flautist Isobel Sollenberger – yet, one quick trip to Sydney for Vivid Live in 2010 at the behest of Lou Reed aside, they've never officially toured Australia.

Now, thankfully, that's all about to change, with their inaugural sojourn to these shores coming despite a relatively quiet period for the quintet of late: their Record Store Day EP from earlier this year, Rise Above It All, was their first official release since their self-titled eighth album dropped back in 2010. Behind the scenes, however, things have been churning away as normal, and – as well as the tour – Bardo Pond fans are about to be inundated with recorded material. Besides a heap of reissues and material from their abundant side-projects in the offing, most excitingly they're about to drop a new album in the northern fall.

“It's a less sprawling album than the last one – I think the longest track is only ten minutes long,” guitarist and founding member Michael Gibbons laughs. “And it's a shorter album. I think it's going to be old school – like a forty-minute, one-album record – that's the way it is right now and that's the way I want it. We really like the songs; it's kind of a more electric album. It has a little bit of acoustic guitar, and was recorded pretty straight-up. We're pretty psyched about it; it's kind of like [1997 album] Lapsed was years ago or something, it's just like a short rock album.”

The typical Bardo Pond track unfurls like some strange quest to the outer reaches of the imagination – what are the band themselves searching for when they confront these new frontiers?

“It's like the sound of the song – the tones and how much each of us can lose ourselves in it,” Gibbons suggests. “We go through a lot of riffs and stuff, and the tunes that live on for us are the ones that have a certain sound or tone that make us want to keep doing it. I think that's what we're looking for. It's like a mutual feeling. It's intuitive. It's really organic and intuitive the way that tunes kind of grow with us and how we all kind of add our own thing to it.

“Sometimes we come in with a vague idea, and then that winds up changing into a different form and then that becomes the idea. Sometimes there's an idea that's pretty strong and we just work to make it as good as we can. It comes a lot out of jamming. Things happen that we don't expect and provide lanes to much better ideas than the one we originally thought it was going to be.

“It's funny because even when we have tunes finished and we're playing live they're morphing still – there will be parts that didn't even make it onto the record that we'll wind up doing live, just because the song has made it known that that's what it wants to be. They pretty much remain close [to recorded versions], but we know the parts that we make up on the road. I miss being on the road for a while, because that's when that stuff really starts happening. If you're out for a month and jamming tracks, they present themself in a way that we have to react to it – it's a fun journey.”