TLM10: BEACON

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“It was fucking wild,” says Thomas Mullarney III, twenty-four, one half of Brooklyn-based electronic outfit Beacon. “St. Louis, down South, up the West Coast—I saw parts of the country I had always wanted to see,” continues Mullarney’s 29-year-old counterpart Jacob Gossett. “It was so beautiful. And we had to do it. We had to play shows to really settle into the idea of writing.”

The pair—Mullarney sings while Gossett handles production onstage—are talking about their recently completed North American tour, a journey that took them out of their familiar Greenpoint art scene and into small venues in cities as diverse as Tuscon and Minneapolis. They would drive for hundreds of miles, play a set, and continue on, stopping every few days to explore the country’s trippy, otherworldly landscapes. “We spent a day in a hot spring in New Mexico and, oh man, it was crazy,” recalls Mullarney. “It just looked like another planet.”

It was their first tour of any real scale—in appropriately twee Brooklyn fashion, they drove a Prius and opened for post-R&B crooner How to Dress Well—and an opportunity to introduce their still-developing brand of moody, bedroom electro to wider audiences.

The tour was also the setting for the early writing of Beacon’s first full-length album, a yet-untitled, ten-track compilation that will be released in April. Rich with densely layered after-hours pop, the album flows in the vein of the Weeknd, though less overtly nihilistic. It came together as Mullarney and Gossett mixed Ginuwine-style beats with textures inspired by the British electronic producer Actress.

That their forthcoming album evolved out of performance is not a surprise, given the group’s history. Mullarney and Gossett first met in 2006 as art students at the Pratt Institute. “I started doing performance art during my third year there—noise performances where I was doing these really low-frequency, like sub-frequency jams—and once I got that out, I felt comfortable performing,” says Mullarney. “I always sang as a kid, but there’s something about doing a performance for the first time in an art-school setting, where you’re in this sort of tight critical setting with your peers, that transforms you,” he explains.

“We didn’t really make music together at all at Pratt, but we collaborated on some other art-related projects,” recalls Gossett. “Then I saw Tom play a solo thing, and I was pretty intrigued.”

An artist friend, painter Tin Nguyen, recalls the band’s early incarnation: “At first, it was just Tom, and he was more doing performance work that was related to music,” he says. “I remember him wearing a full-body pink spandex suit that was paired with a bed of pink sand. I don’t remember exactly what happened, but it wasn’t about music. Later, Tom and Jacob teamed up and they were sort of ‘jamming’ at shows with equipment. They would make videos and things to play while they were making sounds. As time went on, they started producing beats and writing lyrics.”

The collaboration became a full-time commitment in 2011. Gossett dropped out of grad school (“I found myself going to my studio, not making any visual art and just making music there.”) and they started writing “proper” songs like “Safety’s Off” and “Feeling’s Gone,” a laid-back, darkly sensual release from their latest EP, For Now.

Atmospheric and slightly hazy, their music presents decaying relationships as a recurring theme (“It’s a long walk from lust to love/And if I get lost it’s not my fault,” sings Mullarney on “Pulse”). Nineties R&B is another constant, while other influences—the heavy beats of hip-hop producer Ayatollah, the repetitive qualities of avant-techno producer Shed, and Actress’ intimate dissonance—are applied to electronic pop that blends the lines between voluminous R&B and minimalist, digital music. “Our music doesn’t really sound like their music at all,” comments Mullarney, “but it’s kind of the idea of breaking the boundaries of electronic music.”

The new album is a culmination of these competing sounds and darker inclinations. “The record offers different perspectives inside the course or cycle of a relationship, with the strongest desires and fears expressed through my voice,” explains Mullarney. “I tried to tell more stories in the lyrics on the full-length than I ever have before.”

They’re also working to further refine their live set. “We’re trying to make the visuals and the sound be much more embedded,” explains Gossett. “The sound will trigger visuals and there will be a direct correlation between what you see and what you hear, instead of just having a video that’s just there, aimlessly playing.”

“Teaching new technology to ourselves will probably open up a whole new can of worms,” he sighs.

Beacon’s The Ways We Separate is out April 30 from Ghostly International.