Chainlacing - ''It’s a creative and urgent kind of tension that I enjoy''
- Sparky
- Jul 10
- 10 min read
Rick Martel and Lauren Crosser are Chainlacing. A Duo that has created a sound that is a fuzz infused Synaesthesia of emotion, depth and an almost kinaesthetic wonder. After teasing several singles, the debut album Messuage is finally available, and it is a revelation of sound that has roots in urban shoegaze but is blessed with a dreamy ethereal wonder that surprises with every listen. It is an intelligent organic melding of two creative forces that began quite simply
Lauren: ‘’My hunger to create something sad and gothic and spacey, when my other band Slow Quit had veered into a different, more satirical, though no less emotive direction. And timing.
Rick: ‘I met Lauren at a show and for whatever reason we immediately started talking about Planning For Burial. I think we were both sort of dressed the same. She was there with these guys that looked like hot jocks, but she had a vaguely goth mommy thing going on. I posted a lot of synth music online back then and she pitched a collaboration one day randomly, which of course I said yes to because who doesn’t want to work with goth mommy. so now there’s chainlacing.
What is lo fi gloom? Does music even need defining?
Lauren: ‘’I only think things need defining for social reasons. Because people need to sort things into patterns, concepts, and categories to make some textual sense of them. And in our world of the online sphere of “short-form truths” (a term I’m stealing from the writer Edmund King) and snapshots, profiles, and the ever-accelerating compulsion toward ease of consumption, I assume most ordinary people aren’t actually listening to new music, they’re evaluating quickly it in a series of moments based on visual cues and terms.
‘’So, when someone navigates to our Bandcamp or our Instagram and sees a brief description of what it is, they’re going to sort it into some kind of sphere of association: with other people they know, with bands they like or bands they hate, with memories of all kinds, or porn maybe, or with any number of things that might chill you to the bone if you really knew. Or with nothing. And in that case, I can only hope and pray that they actually give it a listen.
Rick: ‘Everything is so hyper-defined now and it makes me sick. a lot of bands are drinking from the same wells while also trying to distinguish themselves and their musical style. I get that. people ask us what style of music we make and obviously there are a lot of precedents in the more ethereal and doomy styles of alternative. we’re trying to innovate in some ways with our amalgamated influences and dank production approach but in my mind, there are already so many specific subgenres that you, the listener, eventually just become Snowblind in trying to differentiate. having said that, we call ourselves dungeon dream-pop because Mauro, the guy who runs our label, suggested it.
Messuage is a striking debut. Did you realize you had something unique when creating it?
Lauren: I don’t really know. I fancy myself an eclectic listener, in a sort of self-congratulatory way, such that I sometimes think I know what’s been done or what’s new. And I think what we make is different from lots of things I’ve already heard. And plenty of people tell me our music is odd or unlike anything they’ve heard, especially with regards to the sum total of all our discography thus far.
‘’But also, there have been a handful of people who classify it as typical shoegaze or something, which I should also point out, is absolutely not what I think of us as doing, but I know no one really has total control over their own narrative and how people hear it. Bands try to do this all the time and fail. Narrow Head gets irritated at being labelled shoegaze. The band Thou has insisted in the past that they prefer to think of themselves as grunge rather than sludge. In many cases the listeners disagree. So, I Dunno. Anyway, I don’t know if I’m comfortable calling it unique, but I’m comfortable calling it weird, and the weirdness is something I’ve been aware of the whole time.
The soundscapes and vocals vary throughout the album, was it intentional to make each track thematically unique?
Rick: ‘’We embrace an exploratory approach to songwriting and recording so it really varies song to song. I get bored and frustrated easily so a lot of our best sonic textures come from me trying to sabotage the process when it feels like it’s heading in an overly familiar direction. sometimes you accidentally ride the horse off the edge of the cliff. someday we’ll release a memorial album for the dead horses.
It's also quite tender as it is intense?
Rick: “Tenderness can be pretty intense sometimes. every year, sweet little kids get rodents as pets and love them so deeply and cuddle them and snuggle them and sometimes those cute little fuckers get cuddled to death. it’s so sad, that innocent desire to express your love while lacking the agency to understand the effects of your tenderness. and then the object of your adoration is dead and you’re left with heartbreak. it’s SOOO fucked up. it’s so sad. I could almost cry just thinking about it. this is a good way to understand our music.
Ethereal and urban in equal measures? Does inspiration come from multiple sources?
Rick: ‘To me a lot of the music on messuage feels like an escape from the urban into something more primordial and unknown. ethereal in the sense that it’s hard to identify directly but evokes the kind of feelings that are often sad and subtle, things that the overstimulation of urban environments tends to drown out.
It has a diverse range of musical styles. Does this come from a wide body of music appreciation?
Lauren: “Yes, definitely. I love anything from depressive black metal to doom to contemporary pop country or r&b. Rick comes from a post punk & goth background, and I love that stuff too, but he’s sort of an archivist of that style of music and has an immense vocabulary for how to create those kinds of soundscapes. Our drives sometimes clash in ways that are generative and I welcome it.
‘’Compulsion, for instance, was one of the first songs we ever made, and it was the first one that took on a magnified significance for me in that it put our different sensibilities on full display. I envisioned it as a depressive black metal song inspired by bands like None, with drawn out simple arpeggiated riffs crescendoing into some wash of noise and unrelenting misery. I’m not quite sure what Rick envisioned when we began tracking it, but the way he produced it led to something totally different, one of our most Have a Nice Life type tracks by accident.
Rick:” All the different music styles you dabble with eventually start bleeding and puking all over each other. I don’t know that we’re aiming to capture any specific pre-existing sound, it’s the mess we’re after.
The power of Sublimate and its transition and redirection?
Rick: “That song is one of the rare occasions where me and Lauren just sat around writing instinctively with no real sense of what we were creating until we were pretty far along in the writing process. and then I remember after we had recorded a draft of it, she had the idea to really blow out the ending of it with extreme noise and heaviness, which I initially disagreed with. the original arrangement went on a bit longer and aside from the dreamy bridge it stayed consistent in its intensity. I programmed a double kick pattern into the end of it sort of trying to sabotage it but then I ended up liking it. oh yeah and then I wrote a little outro bit that I feel like has an eerie and bittersweet quality that ties the whole thing together. so, I guess I have to give Lauren extra credit chocolate brownie ice cream sundae points because if she hadn’t forced my hand into making it get bombastic, I never would have written that outro :/
Where does that warm sound come from?
Rick: ‘It comes from the ceiling of my New Hampshire apartment. it drips down through the cracks in the roof and gets all over my equipment. it’s a sludgy blend of old roof tiles, dead leaves and it still retains a bit of that murky autumnal rain smell that I think many would find familiar and ‘warm’ in tone.
Is the emotional impact of the music more important than technique?
Lauren: “For me, absolutely. I approached guitar out of a desire to create affect and just pure emotive sounds. I was a drummer before, and I never really learned how to play guitar. I’m just starting to take guitar lessons now after years of just noodling around for what sounds good and moody. But my love of dark emotional music is what drew me to Rick’s sensibilities as a collaborator, because he’s on an endless quest for otherworldly sounds that sound dark or broken or fucked up. I know plenty of people who make a big deal out of virtuosity, I grew up hanging out with a lot of technical death metalheads, and I love them and I love a good amount of metal (though not tech death!!!), but I find the prioritization of technicality over emotion pretty fucking boring. Though I do think at a certain point a person should know how to play an instrument, or improve their craft, which is why I’m trying to learn.
Rick: what technique lol.
As a duo does it allow for a clarity of vision when it comes to creating music?
Lauren: “When it’s just the two of us, yes, and we pretty quickly had a more or less cohesive vision about what kinds of sounds and visuals we wanted, and because we work so much and spend so much time together it allows us to explore new and old ideas constantly. But we also want our live shows with our full band to be massive and loud, and we want to bring the rest of the band into the songwriting process as much as we can. Because we’re all adults with adult jobs, and we’re all in other bands, the full-band collaboration process is inevitably slower. So, there’s some tension there between the intimacy of the duo and the full band in terms of process, but it’s a creative and urgent kind of tension that I enjoy.
The importance of presenting a true expression of oneself through your music or art?
Lauren: “I don’t know what a true expression of oneself is but know what the question is getting at, and I appreciate the opportunity to answer.
“Obviously there’s some kind of continuum between what people call “performative” or “inauthentic” and “real” or “authentic.” for instance I use the shit out of social media but I refuse to follow Instagram music content trends like those short form vertical videos that say shit like “POV, you just encountered a female fronted Sisters of Mercy” / or “POV if the Smiths existed in 2026 it would be ME” or videos of a band playing in a mall or something. Because those kinds of things, to me, are not only the most clearcut examples of inauthenticity, but I strongly believe those people won’t be remembered in ten or twenty years despite their big engagement metrics, and if cultural historians look back at it, most of it’ll look pretty fucking stupid. An indicator of a dark age for music marketing. Then again, maybe they’ll be fine. Perhaps they’re relying on the idea that the eyes of history won’t judge them because the field and practice of history won’t exist. And they might be right.
‘’On the one hand I really think everyone is actually performative or untrue whether they think they’re being “real” or not, because the “true” self in modernity is illusive. The individual is constituted by others and by consumer culture. Especially a narcissistic media culture that has democratized everyone’s ability to brand themselves and appeal to the lowest common denominator. But on the other hand, I think that at our age, if you don’t have a certain kind of confidence in what you’re creating, or a clear sense of what feels right–as opposed to what others will like, or what feels ‘relevant’ to others at the moment–then you need to grow up. And the constant obsession with ‘relevance’ and the ‘new’ is a surefire sign that it’ll be obsolete in due time.
Other favourite pieces of art you are currently enjoying? (Books/films etc)
Lauren:
SHOW: Adolescence - a drama on Netflix about a boy’s trajectory into misogynistic radicalization and the murder of a female classmate. People say it’s heavy-handed, but I think people who say that shit don’t know enough alienated boys & men and don’t interact with enough kids. I’ve been teaching all ages from elementary school to college for over ten years, and I have a lot of depressed friends. I can attest that it’s not heavy-handed. A lot of people in this atomized world are dark as fuck. What I love about the show is that, while the boy is responsible for what he’s done, the story shows the role of every institution in this boy’s life that helped shape his radicalization, or neglected the signs due to institutional decay and the demands of capitalism (the family, the carceral state, the school, the social milieu, the online sphere, etc.)
BOOK: The Culture of Narcissism by Christopher Lasch (1979) - a book that theorizes causes and consequences of our narcissistic culture and also complicated popular understandings of narcissism at the time it was written in the late 70s. The narcissistic personality of our time is a husk of a person seeking ego validation from everywhere.
Rick:
BOOK: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans
Book: The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor
Film: L’age D’or (it’s ambient cinema)
TV: Home Movies
Top 6 favourite albums of all time?
Lauren:
Of course this is hard, but I’m really going by what are the albums I’ve probably listened to the most, more than any other albums, backward and forward, and which I find a place for in any moment, any mood, any period of my life. Which were formative for my understanding of what was possible musically.
The Cure - Disintegration
My Bloody Valentine - Loveless
Emma Ruth Rundle - Some Heavy Ocean
Rick:
Yeah, I’m too big of a music dork to answer this without some agita. So many 90’s Projekt records albums I want to drop some hype on. Ultimately though if we’re traveling light, here are 3ish albums that had massive formative effects on my musical development and absolutely changed the way I think about. more than music.
Red House Painters - both(!) their self-titled albums iykyk
The Chameleons - Strange Times
Lycia - The Burning Circle and Then Dust
Our new album Messuage: https://chainlacing.bandcamp.com/album/messuage
Messuage for purchase at IndieMerch (for US customers): https://www.indiemerchstore.com/collections/chainlacing?srsltid=AfmBOoqXYF-IKTnn71qUtYprPZsBnLpGX7F5nFOZI1XcveO2U-R5MOyd
Our bandcamp page: https://chainlacing.bandcamp.com/
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/7glF1FgEEhx6dhYEGndUty
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0GuCkEqoP121yv6B25YkCg
Lauren’s substack (social theory and sometimes cultural critique): https://laurencrosser.substack.com/
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