Exclusive album of ‘Pastoral’ by Phantom Limb, out today via Earth Libraries.

Andrew Laningham has a background in experimental/noise music and free improvisation. He is also an interpersonal communication researcher focusing on deception, pursuing his master’s degree at The University of Alabama. Rolfe plays in Human Beat and Burning Moon. He is also the principal songwriter in The Bouquets. Peyton is the principal songwriter in the band Toguro.

Like so many individuals stuck in self-isolation in their apartments, Andrew Laningham started to dream about wide open expanses. But the pandemic wasn’t causing him to fantasize about some idyllic wilderness; Laningham was dreaming about the rural Alabama as he knows it, the full-spectrum reality of his youth, both in its beauties and its pains. So he spent his quarantine time as if compelled, producing what would come to be ‘Pastoral’, the latest from his band, Phantom Limb.

Speaking on the album, frontman Andrew Laningham wrote:
“‘Pastoral’ is a meditation on the concepts of home, memory, the South, and paranoia. The songs comprise a loose narrative about coming to terms with the idea of home as imperfect, and kind of sinister. It’s also about the internet being overstimulating to the point of numbness, and figuring out the differences between how you see yourself and how you exist in the real world. I wrote a record about the South, my relationship to it, and its relationship to me.

I wanted ‘Pastoral’ to sound like it was being haunted by old AM radio signals, but I didn’t have much experience recording or have access to professional equipment. What I did have, though, was some microphones, guitar amps, a synthesizer, and a pretty large collection of tapes I found sifting through thrift stores in rural Alabama.

Those tapes ended up defining the sound of Pastoral. All of the instruments on the record (outside of guitars/bass/drums/synths) came from samples of cassette tapes that I found. A lot of the tapes that I was listening to were home recorded by the people that lived near me. I found these types of samples intriguing because they grounded the record in a very specific place: Alabama.

I was reading a lot of Mark Fisher’s writing on Hauntology when making Pastoral. Fisher talks about how nostalgia and the past can impede our ability to conceptualize the future. Unintentionally, I made a record that illustrates that idea and contextualizes it in the South. Most of the songs on Pastoral are about how the past can still haunt the present in one way or another, and the sonic palette of the record is supposed to feel like songs being swallowed by symbols of the past. I think the central idea of the record is this: nostalgia can be comforting, but sometimes you have to let nostalgia go in order to move forward in life.”