Will Cullen Hart: Mastermind behind the gorgeous and complex Circulatory System
Will Cullen Hart is a producer and musician of psychedelic rock. He’s most notable for his roles in The Olivia Tremor Control, Circulatory System, and his contributions to the Elephant Six Collective.
Hart’s recording techniques are experimental and chaotic. Strings, woodwinds, brass, percussion, mandolins, harpsichords, ukuleles, guitars and overdubbed vocals are stacked on top of each other and crammed into usually one to five minute songs. As well as instruments, Hart utilises any number of tape sounds, feedback hisses, blips, screeches and signal noises to add further colour to his songs.
Despite this seemingly ramshackle approach, Hart pours months and years into mixing each album, pouring over minute details and endlessly tinkering with volume levels, EQ’s and the copious delay, reverb, phaser, tremolo, flanger and tape effects he employs. It’s this contrast, amongst others in Hart’s music, that make his work so interesting. His mixes are chaotic, but simultaneously carefully considered. His songs have occasional dissonant and cacophonous moments, but often give way to beautiful string or woodwind arrangements. Songs don’t follow predictable song structures, but have their own internal consistency, musicality and logic.
This logic is that of the surrealistic dreamworld. All of Hart’s efforts — the attention to minute details, the layering of sounds, the homespun and ramshackle recording process — culminate in a dreamy, otherworldly soundscape. Reversed guitars are interspersed with sporadic drums or clarinets. Dissonant static fades and gives way to string combinations, or nearly whispered vocals. Hart’s music often exists in liminal spaces, in between chaos and order, or dream and reality, containing parts of each.
Hart’s vocal style is similarly surrealistic. He frequently overdubs vocals three or four times, panning them left or right, and then delaying each very slightly. This gives his vocals a lot of presence in the stereo field, but not much focus. Along with clarinets, guitars or static hisses, Hart’s voice becomes another instrument in the mix, rising and falling, or alternately shifting between speakers along with the music.
Hart’s lyrics also assist in weaving his dreamworld tapestry. Words seem stitched together, seemingly nonsensically, and are often felt emotionally rather than intellectually. An example of this is the five-line “Your Parades”, where Hart intones “Create your own parades, invite the stars and planets/Reach the heavens, just inside/You never knew it was coming/In balloons of your own design/You can land there day or night.”
This isn’t to say that Hart’s lyrics are entirely nonsensical. As is obliquely mentioned in the lyrics of “Your Parades” above, Hart seems fixated on perceived notions of time, of what it means to live in the present, and how the past informs every moment. Conceptions of the body, self autonomy, and transcendence also abound. “Who wants to rise above their chemistry tonight?” Hart sings in the excellent “Inside Blasts”. As with the music, Hart’s lyrics deal in contrasts — past and present, and the corporeal world and its transcendence.
A comment on Hart’s stylistic allusions is appropriate. Hart is clearly inspired by the experimental albums Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles, and The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. Rather than pastiche, however, Hart attempts to encapsulate the psychedelic and exploratory ethos of the time these records were made to create his own musical vision.
From the lyrical content to the lengthy mixing process, form, theme and content are all dutifully woven together into a complete whole. Hart is the undeniable auteur of his own unique, fascinating and inspiring vision.
