“Some quiet dream comes to bleed.”
Welcome to In Conversation, a special interview column on the site where we sit down with artists and dive deep into everything music. Dobbin chatted to Cory Brim (guitar), Dustin Coffman (bass and vocals) and Scott Osment (drums) of Glassing at their New Cross Inn show, shortly after they played ArcTanGent 2024. Photography by Dobbin.
Dobbin: This is your first time in the UK, how does it feel?
Cory: Good – we should have been here three years ago, but COVID hit. We had a DIY tour booked, two and a half weeks, were about to get on the plane, and it got cancelled. Since we’re here now, it’s been delightful. ArcTanGent was a highlight, and it seems like London is gonna be another. It’s been wonderful, getting used to all the cultural differences has been fun. Got to see where Lemmy was born in Stoke!
Dobbin: The UK has a reputation for having good shows but not treating bands well…
Dustin: America is the same way, no-one gives a shit about you.
Cory: There’s no hospitality there in terms of putting you up with a place to say, things like that. I think that’s mostly a Europe thing. We start in the UK and go to the EU – the other way would be…
Dobbin: How has it felt to release The Other Side Of The Mirror?
Dustin: Good, a lot of good reception. It was a brutal record to write and record. Our drummer lives in San Diego, I now live in LA and Cory lives in Texas. At the time I was still in Texas, so we’d fly out Scott for a week, and we’d have a week to write two songs. When you set hard deadlines for yourself like that with studio time, you force yourself to figure out a way to write a song that makes the cut. We’re pretty particular about what we decide to put out, for the most part. We have high standards and short deadlines. We found that this hyper-focus, practising every day, thinking about it after practice… we can come up with two songs in a week, for the most part.
Dobbin: Compared to the previous records, to put it bluntly, From The Other Side Of The Mirror is like ‘bangers’ – focused tracks, more ‘normally’ structured songs. Whereas Spotted Horse, particularly, that’s a really structurally challenging album. Twin Dream was a bit more mixed. The new one is more ‘song’ oriented, and each track worries a bit less about what’s either side of it.
Dustin: It’s funny that you notice that, because Spotted Horse and The Other Side Of The Mirror were written in almost completely different ways. Almost polar opposites. For Spotted Horse, one of the reasons why it’s called that is because we named it after the street that the ranch where we went to write the record was on. It was about an hour outside of town, a desolate Texas style thing. It was a friend of ours, Adam, a lathe engineer who let us use his house. We took a week off and went there. We were with the songs every single day, structuring the flow, and because we had never written a record like that in that way, we wanted to see what would happen. We liked that process a lot. Sometimes you do need to spend all day and all night on a song. Out there there was no sound code violation – you could play as loud as you want all day. Spotted Horse had this fluid album context about how each song fed into the next. For From The Other Side Of The Mirror, as you said, each song is kind of isolated in its own specific attempt, because that’s how it was written.
Dobbin: Having said all that, the flow between the tracks works super well, so I feel like it’s got the best of all worlds.
Dustin: One thing we try to do with all our records is make it so that it’s a seamless listen. Some of our favourite bands write ‘records’ – we’ve always been big fans for that, so we always keep that in mind. How will this feel as one big ‘thing’? We notice a lot of younger bands are just doing singles, they’re not doing albums any more. And we’re kind of like, shit, is the album dying? Is it going away? If it’s up to us, we’ll keep doing it that way.
Dobbin: One thing that Glassing has always had as a big part of the record are the ambient tracks. You really let these breathe – sometimes they’re short like on Twin Dream, or sometimes they’re long like “The Kestrel Goes”. When it comes to writing those songs, what’s your thought process? Do you say ‘today, we’re going to do an ambient song’, or do you find a place for an ambient track and design it for that space?
Cory: It’s a bit of both, actually. My other project, I suppose, is that I do yoga sessions, and I score a live yoga session. A bunch of ambient compositions, take off the heavy pedals, add a bunch of reverb and delay, make loops, a lot of that. It’s something I’ve done for a long time – in fact Dustin and I met because I was doing that in a live setting. He came to one of my dinky shows.
Dustin: I think I was basically the only one there.
Cory: I think Smiling With A Knife was at that show, actually… So that’s kind of how I learned to play guitar. It kind of showcases a bit of who we are. Dustin adds to it too. There was actually a whole ambient composition that got cut, just me having ten layers for a couple of minutes. We opted instead for the one that has Dustin’s pulsing, drone-y type thing. I added a bunch of ambient stuff on that. So, it’s part of the DNA of the band – there’s a lot of effects on our music, and to be able to strip away a lot of the heavy aggression, and focus only on what would be left, is what those tracks represent.
Dobbin: I find these tracks really important for your records. Particularly “Where Everything Is Still” at the end of Twin Dream, the guitar is carrying the mood over to the next song. Similar with “The Kestrel Goes” after “Circle Down”.
Cory: Yeah, it’s kind of like a light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel type thing. It’s kind of how life is, a little reprieve from the crushing weight. To me, it’s kind of the way life is – there’s highs, there’s lows, there’s heaviness, there’s lightness, beauty, ominous stuff… And that’s part of our range, not every Glassing song is the same.
Dobbin: Speaking of that range, another Glassing trait are the songs that come at the end of an LP, or side of an LP, where you have a triumphant mood, like “Wake”, or the tracks at the end of Twin Dream. They’re still really heavy, too – when it comes to writing those songs, what’s your thought process?
Cory: Kind of like what I was touching on a minute ago, you know, the songs that move me the most – when I first discovered post rock that I was an impressionable age, a teenager. When you first get into music, it’s fun. And then you start to discover music that is not just fun, it’s… perhaps touching, it’s deeper. To go from Blink 182 to The Cure, that type of thing. To find out that music is not just fun, or badass, or emotional – it can be all of them.
Dustin: I think when we write albums, there’s a few things we try to keep in mind. As I’ve mentioned in the past, my favourite record is Deloused in the Comatorium by The Mars Volta. When you put that record on, it’s everything that I want my records to sound like. It feels like you’re watching a movie. It takes you on a journey, and then sometimes you push the listener to a point where there’s been so much that you need some sort of reprieve from that, just because that dynamic loses its power if you keep blasting it. That’s one thing we always try to consider – it has to be dynamically rewarding for the listener, and whilst doing that, formulate some sort of concept around that. That is where our most interesting stuff happens. If you had to close your eyes and describe a record as a movie… that’s something that we aspire to do. The Mars Volta made some of the gold standard concept albums, so for me, I don’t think we’ll ever get to that point, but as long as we have them in our sights, anything we attempt will be fine.
Cory: I always think it’s funny when people say “and then they have these two interlude tracks – I don’t know why they needed to be on the record…”. That may be an interlude to you, but for me, it’s necessary. In the live setting in kind of the same way, we’ve tried to take “Twin Dream” out, but it always ends up coming back in, because there’s something to it, it gives that dynamic that we try to do on the record.
Dobbin: Scott, you’ve newly joined the band, how has that changed Glassing?
Scott: As a fan first, I was their number one… I went to Cory’s house to get the first shirt and CD, and the first house show. Jason Camacho, their previous drummer, and this style and vibe that I always appreciated, but we had a mutual appreciation because we were both so different. So coming into this band, I thought, how do I adapt my style into Glassing, appreciating Jason’s style? Before joining Glassing I’d been playing in d-beat and grind bands. I think that’s noted with tracks like “Defacer” and “As My Heart Rots”. I would imagine that it’s shifted how songwriting works for the other two.
Cory: It’s a little more direct now. We can get to the point very quickly. We’ve never been an efficient band, but now we’re the most efficient we’ve ever been. We still throw away a lot of stuff, but the songs are coming together easy, and it’s a natural fit. We always joke that Scott and I can write a metalcore album right now… we wrote a song in soundcheck. There’s natural chemistry, we know what each other are doing.
Dobbin: Cory, do you release your ambient music?
Cory: No – it’s kind of more fun that way, to write something, set a loop of it, and when I unplug things, it’s gone forever. I always think that’s kind of fun. I just do it under my own name. The last one I did was when the eclipse happened, it was on the roof of a yoga studio. It just comes with the wind and leaves. A lot of it’s improvised, but I do have prepared material for it too. A lot of it is just Mogwai riffs, though!
Dobbin: You played ArcTanGent, but not on the same day as Mogwai. Were you disappointed to miss them?
Cory: Yeah, I was disappointed – but, I wasn’t too disappointed, because nothing will ever top how I saw them the first time. When I was eighteen I went to see The Cure at this festival, and there was a band playing earlier called Mogwai. I’d never heard of them, and it kind of blew my fucking socks off. Nothing will ever top that.
Check out our review of Glassing‘s From The Other Side Of The Mirror.