Amoeba Music

Growing - Biography

Growing is a strange, shape-shifting beast. A band that has always seemed to live in the aesthetic shadow of others, yet continually offers its unique slant on the influences it references, Growing’s midlife move across the country coincided with its shift in musical direction. From wallowing in the drone to shimmering in the groove, Growing’s music remains playfully hallucinatory throughout the band’s changes.

Growing was founded in Olympia, Washington in 2001 by guitarists Kevin Doria, Joe Denardo and drummer Zack Carlson. After a slew of self-released cassettes and a 7” EP, venerable Chicago label Kranky picked up on the band’s thick drone-powered sound. The label released Growing’s first CD and full-length debut, The Sky’s Run Into The Sea (2003 Kranky). Immediately lumped into the then new but ever widening legion of droning doom metal maniacs like Sunn O))), a closer listen reveals the larger influence of classic guitar ambience like Ashra’s New Age Of Earth or Fripp & Eno’s No Pussyfooting. Early Growing certainly drowns itself in heavy riffs smudged to infinity and wrapped in cavernous dark drones, but this sound almost always folds out into blissful open vistas of sun-flecked beauty.

The following year Growing released its sophomore effort, The Soul Of The Rainbow And The Harmony Of Light (2004 Kranky). Carlson left directly after the first album, leaving the guitar only duo of Doria and Denardo. Following in the vein of the debut record, the sound of the new music is thicker and more claustrophobic, especially the first half of the record, but also slightly more melodic. It’s a less obviously dynamic record that the debut, but there is actually more activity swimming under the drone surface. Growing has made its drones more harmonically rich and active with microtonal shimmer. Again the doom of the record is tempered with the closing track, which uses field recordings of birds and water to gorgeous effect.

If early Growing is ambient music stripped of its ethereal cheese and made for skuzzy acid rock fans and recorded in stoned, dank places in the Pacific Northwest, then Growing’s second act would find them incorporating more fashionable elements into the music. Relocating to New York City some time in 2004, Growing’s full transformation would take a few releases. Signing with hip Brooklyn label Troubleman Unlimited, the duo recorded His Return (2005 Troubleman) both at home and with producer Sean Maffucci. The album is not one of the band’s best. It seems to stumble while trying to incorporate a more melodic element, yet still holding on to the unending power drone of the previous records. The saving grace is “Freedom Towards Death” which features a rare vocal and remains one of Growing’s most hypnotic tracks.

On Color Wheel (2006 Troubleman), Growing finds footing in the details. It’s not a major step forward, but the accent here is placed more obviously on texture. The drones shift more, incorporating more grain and, well, color. If Growing has always worked with smudged hues of ashy grey, Color Wheel takes some cues from the multicolored music of Growing’s more technology minded peers like Fennesz or Keith Fullerton Whitman. The sounds are brighter, with more intense textural depth in each singular aural event. On the whole it doesn’t radically break with earlier Growing, but it does further expand the band’s palette beyond high volume power sludge and stands as one of Growing’s most subtly crafted drone-centric records.

After another avalanche of cassette-only releases and archival live LPs, Growing left Troubleman Unlimited for up and coming Brooklyn label The Social Registry in 2007. The last record for Troubleman breaks totally new ground for the band. Vision Swim (2007 Troubleman) is one of the best Growing records to date. Obviously under the influence of friends and fellow delay pedal enthusiasts Black Dice, Growing begin to solidify the newborn ideas set forth on Color Wheel. Most notably, a steady rhythmic element emerges in the music bringing to mind the loose pulse of cosmic Krautrock pioneers Harmonia and Cluster or the minimal techno throb of Dettinger and Ricardo Villalobos. Instead of traditional drum sounds, Growing take the cue laid out on Black Dice’s masterpiece Creature Comforts and utilize the strobing delayed sounds of guitars and bass to create the music’s rhythmic center. In lieu of the drone, this pulse becomes the bedrock for the band’s new sound, allowing both members to jam guitar lines, textural noise and various dubwise bleeps over top. The endless shifting and interlocking patterns weave in and out of phase underneath, creating a beautifully woozy trance-inducing mess a la Terry Riley. Growing had hit on something serious with this new approach, creating engaging sound-webs that stand head and shoulders above their early drone stasis.

Steering the sound full throttle in this pulsing new direction, Growing contribute a 7” to The Social Registry’s Singles Club series in 2007 (Disconfirm/Horizon Drift, 2007 The Social Registry), followed by the EP Lateral (2008 The Social Registry). Lateral offers a slightly subdued take on Growing’s current sound. With an emphasis on gauzy ambient phase and textural crackle, the EP burns slow and heavy.

Later in 2008, Growing dropped the bomb. Its first full-length for The Social Registry fully embraces the mid-tempo minimal techno thump of Vision Swim and places it totally upfront. All The Way (2008 The Social Registry) is a glorious record, with large passages of swirling ambience building up into E2-E4 inspired hypnotic rhythm madness while Jerry Garcia spins wonky lead guitar lines over it all. It’s hard music to describe, sounding like if Terry Riley made a disco album recorded in an isolation tank. Certainly Black Dice are mining similar territory, but Growing bring a looser, more laid back vibe to the party.

While early Growing records fit nicely into the drone tradition alongside contemporaries like Earth and Sunn O))), the band’s work post-Color Wheel is undoubtedly its most important and engaging. By shifting the focus from minimal sustained tones to minimal percolating grooves, Growing has forged a sound well outside the trends of current psychedelic bands, Black Dice notwithstanding.