Weird Choices by Golden Brown

“Weird Choices”, Stefan Beck’s third release with Inner Islands as Golden Brown, sees Beck taking decidedly different approaches from last year’s “Luminous”. Whereas “Luminous” featured a very guitar-centric palette, these new pieces focus on augmenting the familiar guitars with keys, synths, and electronics in favor of more spacey compositions. These tracks also grew out of experiments with compositional duration as Beck elaborates, “I started a practice of making these miniatures - one to two minute long songs that still felt fully formed and expressive but simple and concise.” Glass Frog, Larvae, Worm Charming, Milton Banana, and Busted Crystal were all realized under that intention.

The longer pieces feature some of the familiar fingerstyle and slide guitar that listeners to Beck’s previous work may be acquainted with. These pieces, by and large, are layered improvisations that conjure floating moods, untether to the terrestrial. The final piece, Olas/Ondas, features a similar approach to the tracks on “Luminous” by using field recordings as a springboard for further extemporizations based on the feel and events of that space. In this case Beck used recordings from a trip to Anini Beach in Kauai to influence the gently cascading piece.

The novel “The Actual Star” by Monica Byrne played a significant role in shaping the mental images and mood that Beck was feeling while recording the album. Beck explains, “part of the book takes place in a future where society collapsed from climate change and had to be adapted/reformed by those who survive. The way they live in that future is through near constant global migration, stopping in refuges along the way for shorter periods of time. It sounds kind of bleak but is actually a more hopeful vision of the future than what our current trajectory looks like.” And related to these ideas of possible imminent futures, the title of the album acknowledges our present; he says it encapsulates “all the maddening aspects of daily life in the last few years that we have to process and compartmentalize just to go about our daily business. Do I choose to go about my day like normal in spite of the ongoing escalating climate crisis? How do I respond in my daily life to the erosion of our civil rights and rising fascism? Do I see my loved ones in spite of an ongoing pandemic? I guess the phrase just kind of stuck with me as we have come to accept as normal circumstances that are anything but.”

Tracklist

1.	Glass Frog	1:19

2.	Weird Choices	3:10

3.	Y Despues	6:37

4.	Larvae	2:42

5.	Octopus Stinkhorn	6:07

6.	Worm Charming	1:54

7.	Milton Banana	2:08

8.	Chrysalis	4:25

9.	Busted Crystal	2:15

10.	Olas/Ondas	13:07

Credits

released February 3, 2023

Stefan Beck: guitar, lap steel, keyboards.
Mastered by Sean Conrad at The Gentle Ways.
Artwork by Sean.

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