Beauty in the Brevity of a Single Moment: A Conversation With Chandler Lach of Ness Lake
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As I’ve repeated time and time again, I had no idea what I was in for when I moved to Detroit at the end of 2018. I had no idea what kind of weather I was about to deal with, what kind of people I was about to meet, or what kind of music scene I was about to uncover. Over the following year and a half, I witnessed some of the most incredible sets of live music I’d ever seen. I discovered bands that were overflowing with creativity, passion, and kindness. I drank so many White Claws in sweaty basements that I can practically taste the lime-flavored carbonation just thinking about it.
I miss the midwest every day. Sure, I miss the Faygo and square pizza, but most of all, I miss that network of creative people that welcomed me with such open arms. I miss the photographers, musicians, and fans that shared the same love and appreciation for music as I did because it was unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before.
Out of the large and seemingly ever-expanding pool of Michigan creativity comes Ness Lake. Initially conceived as the solo-project of Chandler Lach, Ness Lake was formed from the ashes of Swordfish, a midwest emo revival band that released one album and made a big splash before the members dispersed on to separate projects. Those bands ranged in scope and style from hardcore, throwback grungy rock, and lo-fi bedroom indie. Ness Lake definitively falls in the latter category but retains Lach’s unmistakable voice that was found throughout the 23 minutes of Rodia. While his vocals may sound similar to those found on the cult emo touchpoint, the difference is precisely what you might expect from nearly a half-decade of time passing; Lach’s songwriting has been honed to a fine point, and his sonic palette has expanded to new heights.
Not only is Ness Lake home to some of the best songwriting in the entire state of Michigan, the scope of the project, and its initial beginnings as a hidden Bandcamp page gave Lach the time, space, and freedom to truly let his creativity unfurl. He was able to experiment, play, and break out of traditional album formats and artistic expectations.
Earlier this year, Lach released Everything Green and Overgrown, 16 entirely self-produced tracks that act as a synopsis of his 2019. At the end of August, he gifted us Low Light, a collection of vignettes that mirror the emotions and feelings we’ve collectively experienced during this claustrophobic year spent in isolation.
While these are just two releases of more than a dozen on Ness Lake’s Bandcamp page, both Everything Green and Low Light act as perfect entry points to Lach’s unique brand of soft, electronic-tinged lo-fi. I sat down with Lach to talk about Ness Lake’s ever-evolving sound, scaling his songs up or down for live shows, and the Michigan scene at-large.
It’s hard to pin Ness Lake down to any one genre. In the past, you’ve described the project as “delay-driven diary-rock,” and more recently, you’ve used the term “sound collections” which simultaneously feels broad yet accurate. How do you describe the project when you’re explaining it to people?
It’s hard! I actually don’t like bringing up the project with people, at all lol. But yeah, it’s hard when I do because it’s not really an easy sound to classify. At least from record to record, I think that the sounds and approach are constantly shifting. Sometimes I just tell people (especially coworkers) that I play “alternative rock” and try to change the subject.
I chose “sound collections” for this most recent release because I’ve been ruminating on like, the molecules of songs? It sounds stupid, or pretentious or whatever, but in sampling and sequencing music, you have so much control about the individuality and minutia of each hit. This is the first record where I’ve used a significant amount of sampling in my production. It’s sort of in vogue, right? Lo-fi beats to chill and study to is such a meme for a reason lol. I can’t explain it, but there’s something really cathartic for me in hearing a fuzzy sample of Lisa Simpson talking over dreamy melodies and loops. With sampling, you can take literally any noise that catches your ear and do whatever you want with it. It reminds me of this VHS they would play for us in elementary school music class of the performance STOMP where they make beats and choreography by slamming trash cans around. It’s like I can take any noise I hear in real life, record it with my phone, then run it through the knobs later on. There’s something really special about viewing music as collecting and arranging, it’s kinda like scrapbooking.
But yeah, I usually just call Ness Lake an “ambient lo-fi pop” project.
Watching you transition from hyper-narrative slice-of-life emo to restrained hypnotic lo-fi has been incredibly fulfilling to watch. What is your process when it comes to writing lyrics and how has that changed over the past few years?
My favorite English teacher, my senior year of high school, would always say “brevity is the soul of wit!”
Yeah, I think there’s a lot of power that exists in the “hyper-narrative slice-of-life” stuff. You can obviously tell more fleshed out stories, but I don’t think that it’s always the most effective approach. In the last year or so, I’ve dedicated a lot of my energy to thinking about my voice as another instrument in the arrangement--being more conscious of its rhythm, melody, and place in the song. Sometimes, that means less is more.
Now, at 25, I work as a 10th grade English teacher, and the last few years I’ve been teaching this collection of vignettes called The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. In teaching vignettes, and having my students write vignettes, I’ve learned a lot about the beauty in the brevity of a single moment. I try to meditate on that throughout the day. Many of my recent songs embody feelings sparked by brief, beautiful interactions and I try to craft the song around that experience.
How has the autonomy of self-producing and self-releasing your own music changed your creative process?
Most of the songs for low light were written and tracked in single 4-8 hour sessions with absolutely zero pressure or outside influence. In seeking further independence, I was also able to complete the complementary tasks like mixing/mastering the songs, crafting the album art, creating the website, and editing the music videos. This was empowering because it’s the first time I’ve ever been able to do these things by myself.
Without an official label leveraging the costs, I don’t feel obliged to fit any specific molds or do anything a certain way anymore to reach an intended audience. I’m just making the kind of stuff that I like now. This being said, I am very thankful for my friend Gabriel Clements and their label Two Foot Parade for doing a small tape run of the album (announcing 10/10/20!)
Of course, I’m also saving a lot of money doing it this way. It’s sad, I wish I had the money to commission and collaborate with the beautiful artists and producers in my life. Recording in a professional studio with an engineer is an incredible experience! Unfortunately, there’s very little to be made in the music industry…. Especially for lo-fi bedroom pop musicians lol.
All this to say, I can’t make this machine turn all alone. I’m very thankful for my friends Matthew Johnson and Isaac Daniels who support Ness Lake in earnest. They’re both very special to me. It’s cool to build relationships with artists who primarily delve into other mediums. Isaac and Matthew have both left lasting impressions on the way that I create and view art.
[Matthew is a multimedia artist and MFA student at University of Northern Texas, where he also teaches introductory art classes to undergraduate students. We find a lot of parallels between our work; while I primarily create auditory media and he creates visual media, we’re able to consider and critique each other’s art at its core form: as expression! Matthew regularly contributes beautiful pieces of his art to the project, including the full album spreads of both Kicking and Rodia (by Swordfish).]
[Isaac is a graphic designer at a company called AREA 17, based out of Brooklyn, New York. Isaac has been a fervent supporter in my life, since he discovered Swordfish in 2017 and somehow inserted himself into my life as a trusted friend and collaborator (lol). Isaac is basically my one-man all-things-emo focus group--he’s honest, in-tune, and constantly hunting for new music to spin. Isaac has helped me with spectacular design work (and is also really patient when I send him some text that I can’t figure out how to align) and also just finished the design work for the low light tape pressing with Two Foot Parade Records.]
It seems like you have all the tools at your disposal to create the exact type of songs that you want. How has your approach to music creation changed over the last few years?
Oh god yeah. The people that are close to me are all well aware of my habits. My collecting habits don’t stop at sounds, unfortunately. I feel like what you’re saying rings true though. When I first started making music (in 2009, freshman year of high school), all I owned was my acoustic guitar, so all I wrote were terrible acoustic pop-punk songs. As I’ve accumulated different pieces of musical gear, I’ve found that I’ve expanded with it. Like… If I have a keyboard, I’m going to use it! I try to create interesting layering with my music to try and make textures, so there’s a lot of room for experimentation.
I’m very privileged to be gainfully employed and have a relatively low cost of living at this current moment. I’ve found great pleasure in buying/selling/trading music gear as a way of testing and trying various gear. After all, as long as you keep good care of your stuff, it usually retains its value. There was a point in my life where I just constantly refreshed /r/letstradepedals, Craigslist, and Facebook Marketplace.
It kind of turned into a game? An addiction? It was cool, I basically got to try every reverb pedal on the market for pretty much the cost of shipping. I feel like you can watch a thousand pedal demos of the same pedal and then once it comes in the mail, it sounds completely different through your own rig than it did through your iPhone speakers when you’re watching Knobs demos. It’s like a curation process. Except I own like eight cassette players for no reason now.
The two main instruments I used for low light were my Teenage Engineering OP-1 and the Elektron Model:Cycles. I was fortunate enough to get them used from friends in some Facebook gear groups I subscribe to. My main workflow lately is to record four instrumental tracks onto the OP-1’s internal recorder, program six drum tracks onto the Model:Cycles, and then I can play them at the same time, essentially allowing me to control ten loops concurrently, bringing parts in and out. Then, I fill in the gaps and add layers on top of this foundation to flesh out the rest of the song. This process has its limitations, but it’s been wonderful for wrangling these collections of sound.
At the beginning of the year, you announced that Marco Aziel of kissyourfriends and Bran McDole of Great Expectations were rounding out Ness Lake live band. What was it about these two that made them the right fit for Ness Lake live?
Marco and Bran are both close friends of mine. I’ve been friends with Marco since like 2016, when Swordfish played with Daddy and the Long Legs. I met Brandon shortly after, from playing with his band too.
It actually worked out really well. A couple years ago, at the school that I work at, we had an open position for a chemistry teacher, and at the time I knew that Brandon 1. Was a pretty cool, good, decent guy, and 2. Had a chemistry teaching degree! So Brandon eventually came to work at our school. It’s pretty funny to be in a band with your coworker.
I tried to keep our music lowkey at work because I’m not ready for the critiques of teenagers haha. But then, about a year ago we asked our principal if we could use an empty classroom as a practice space. So a couple of the students have seen our drum kits and amps haha.
Marco and I have had a close artistic relationship for a while. I really admire their perspective on life, but especially music. They’re like my musical sage haha. We have a group chat where we’re just constantly bouncing demos and experiments and ideas off of each other. It’s really inspiring to have these kinds of relationships and hear other’s perspectives on art. Both Marco and Brandon, being songwriters, bring immense value to the project, past their technical abilities. It’s really beautiful (and satisfying?) to see how songs expand and evolve once they’ve spent some time with the full band.
Your live shows range from full-band post-rock to loopy distorted acoustic slowcore when playing solo. How do you go about scaling your songs up or down to fit the given situation?
So I feel like I have two different types of songs.
There are songs that I just do as one-offs, to capture ideas or moments that I’ve created but have no intention of trying to recreate. These songs typically have a ton of layers and would be very difficult to recreate in a live setting (without just using backing tracks, which I might have to do for low light? IDK I’m still thinking about how I want to perform some of those tracks). These songs aren’t played live, but I think that they are unique, special, and worth sharing. I believe that a lot of musicians probably have similar practices, but don’t publish that writing. I just scrolled down and looked at the interview questions, so it seems like I can elaborate more on this a little later on.
Then, there are the songs that I commit more energy and thought into their creation. This is much easier for me to do on my guitar. These songs are usually written with the intent of bringing them to a full-band arrangement. These songs are also the ones that I remember how to play, so they’re typically on the setlist...
For performances, if the full band is available, practiced, and willing, absolutely nothing matches the energy, excitement, and immersiveness of playing with a full-band. It’s sweet. If the band doesn’t meet those conditions, I’ll typically ask the promoter if it’s cool if I perform solo. Sometimes, they’re looking for a full-band, and that’s totally cool.
For scaling the songs down, I like ‘loopy distorted acoustic slowcore’ as a genre name lol. Yeah, I’d say that the “loopy distorted” elements are new to the last few years. I guess it’s kind of me just experimenting with and expanding on the singer-songwriter-with-an-acoustic-guitar trope to try and make it more interesting/true to what I want it to sound like?
Before every solo (or + Marco) set, I choose like 5-7 songs that I’m confident in. For smaller, more personal shows, I might get a little creative, but I put a lot of pressure on myself when I’m performing, so I try to play ones that I’m really comfortable with. Then each song is conceptualized for whatever I want to play.
If I’m feeling lazy/depressed/etc. Maybe I’ll just bring my acoustic, but if Marco doesn’t have anything going on and we can practice, we pull out as many stops as we can, preparing loops/samples and figuring out which of the Casio drum beats sound good. It’s cool to approach the songs as general structures and then flesh them out in unique ways for each performance.
You’ve seemed to be using more and more vocal manipulation over the years to the point where your voice is almost unrecognizable on some tracks. What is it about these techniques and effects that you’re drawn to?
I think it’s starting to get trendy in our circles. There are tons of artists, especially outside of “emo” that are already skewing their vocals and have been forever, but I think the “archetypical voice” of emo might be shifting? It’s like you click on 90% of /r/emo posts and their vocalist either sounds like Brendan Lukens, Mike Kinsella, or Brian Sella. I don’t think it’s necessarily bad, but in the wake of this, I’m seeing many artists in the genre start to develop their own vocal stylings with positive outcomes. My friend Geoff of the hit rock and roll band Blush Cameron sings like no one else I know, and it’s captivating. Simultaneously, you have acts like 100 gecs, Alex G, and NNAMDÏ that are all wizards of vocal manipulation and are heralded in our music communities. I think people are excited to hear artists breaking the mold.
I think there are a lot of things that draw me to it though. I think that manipulating my voice, similar to how I manipulate my synths/guitars, puts me in a place where I think of my voice as an instrument? I’ve spent so many years agonizing over lyrics and viewing them almost separately to the music itself, but vocal manipulation, especially pitching, makes me think about the role of melody. If you listen to my older songs, you can definitely tell.
I don’t always love my voice either haha, it’s fun to obscure the track and make it feel like someone else is singing the song.
Despite the fact that the pandemic has thrown a wrench into live music, it seems you’re as productive as ever. How has quarantine and isolation impacted your creative flow?
I guess that it hasn’t impacted my creative flow much at all- except my hours as a teacher are a lot more flexible now since we’re doing some hybrid virtual/in-person learning right now. There are some days where I don’t have to go to school, and I can work on music as soon as I finish my professional tasks for the day. I wrote and recorded low light during the summer though, so we’ll see how much writing I can get done now that work has picked up again.
That being said, the pandemic definitely threw a wrench in our full-band recording plans. Marco, Bran, and I were supposed to have a full-band record finished by the end of Summer 2020. With everything that’s happened, we haven’t practiced since March. It’s hard for me because we had about 12-15 demos I was excited about, and now I can’t even remember how to play some of them haha. I trust that when the time is right, we will be able to bring it to life, but I don’t think there’s any point in rushing it.
I would say that I’ve always sort of leaned toward isolation before all of this happened too. Being social takes a lot of energy, and mental illness only makes it more difficult. Working on music alone in front of my computer is really peaceful. I don’t think this is anything really unique, but things like music, video games, TV, and social media let me pause the executive functioning parts of my brain for a bit- giving me some release from anxiety. Sometimes the pausing can be a little excessive though.
Writing songs alone allows me to really ruminate on the feelings I’m trying to compartmentalize and channel into these songs. I think that there is a certain freedom of expression when you’re alone too. Even when I’m collaborating with my most trusted friends, there is a pressure that comes with playing with other people. There’s comfort in solitude.
Even though it’s only several years old, your discography as Ness Lake is pretty daunting. Do you view yourself as prolific, or is that just the form that your process takes? Similarly, what would you recommend as people’s entry point to the band?
I definitely view it as the form that my process takes. I counted all of the songs I’ve ever written and published a while ago, and it was like over 100 lol. I don’t take any pride in writing a lot of songs. I think that there are at least a handful of terrible, unlistenable songs in the discography too. Ness Lake started as a way for me to privately post and share demos that weren’t a good fit for Swordfish. I liked Bandcamp’s UI better than SoundCloud, so I made NL as a secret Bandcamp project so I could pass around demos without something like Google Drive or Dropbox. I think I romanticized myself as some kind of aloof mysterious lo-fi artist at the time. There’s a Ness Lake Tumblr from that time period too lol.
I think that most people in the industry or scene or whatever have the mindset of “quality > quantity” and there’s validity to that for sure. I would say it's definitely motivated by capitalism though because “quality” is what sells records, runs labels, collects clicks, whatever. I think this mentality locks a lot of people out because it takes a LOT of resources to record an LP in a professional studio.
Along with this, I think there’s tremendous value in capturing the process of artistic expression and growth alongside these “quality songs.” If an artist on a low-scale indie label’s press schedule can only release one, ten-song album a year, what happens to all of the stuff that doesn’t make it into that record? Where is the first acoustic demo of their #1 single? Where is the song that the band decided was too slow? Where is the goofy pop song that the band made at 2 AM? Where is the song that the band couldn’t afford to record because they ran out of time?
I think artists limit themselves by only revealing only *the most pristine* bits to the public. It doesn’t have to be perfect to be good. If you’ve created something that you think is beautiful and worth sharing, then it’s worth sharing. If anything, let it be a token on your path so you can look back and see how far you’ve come.
But yeah, when I’m telling someone about the band, I usually ask them if they know what lo-fi is. If the answer is no, I usually just recommend hopping into kicking because it has the broadest appeal to your average “rock n roll listener” lol. If the answer is yes, I would suggest listening to low light because I feel like it’s the best representation of my music right now (which would make sense since it just released lol) I don’t know. Each of the albums has a different feel or texture. If I was trying to get into NL, what I would do is just put the whole discography on shuffle and write down the names of the albums that the songs I liked were from.
Finally, what advice would you give to people looking to create music on their own?
Uhhh, I’m going to write a bunch of cliches/things I’ve learned here:
The hardest part of music is coordinating band practices.
Be gentle with yourself and others; it’s just art, so it’s ok to mess up.
Don’t compromise your visions for others’ approval, because sometimes you won’t get any approval at all, and then you’re left with nothing.
If you’re not enjoying the process, you’re not doing it right.
You don’t have to publish everything you create, but you should probably record it.
There are lots of inexpensive ways to dip your toes into music creation.
Everyone can and should make noise.
Thanks for readin!
