Former Life Without Buildings guitarist Robert Dallas Gray has emerged in recent years as a creator of solo guitar music, operating in the zone between melody and the avant garde.
Robert recently released his third solo record ‘The Vallum’ and itm? caught up with him recently to discuss the continuing evolution of his solo music
Robert is quick to acknowledge that his current spell of creativity directly emerged from an invitation from Martin John Henry to collaborate on what developed into Whin.
“I had this little bit that I’d been playing and suggested that we try and play it to hear what the amp sounded like as an audition piece. I never really thought it could be a piece of music but it became ‘Morning’ the improvised duo piece on the Whin album, ‘Dawn Firth’.
“So that sort of made me feel like these little things that I’d started to play could actually be recordings and that’s what became ‘Reels’ the first record.”
“After that, I kind of felt I had an approach that I could continue with and that I had a process that I could work through. “
That working method led fairly quickly to a second record ‘The Rain Room’ released in 2023.
“For ‘The Rain Room’ I had pieces that had kind of been written and that I performed. And while there some improvisational aspects to all of them, they were written pieces and I got what I thought was the right take for the record.
“On this one, I had a couple of things that I wanted to get down that I knew were that were quite organised and quite written with structure. But then I had a lot of things that were just ideas so what wound up on the record was performances.
“So this record was less about the sort of learning process that the first two records were, and more about a kind of performing process.”
When he’d stopped playing after the demise of Life Without Buildings, Robert had passed on his amp to his brother-in-law and one of the key influences on the new record was that he was able to use that amp again after it had been returned and refurbished.
“That actually fed really directly into how the tracks developed and what they sound like, because the way that I play is that I’m interacting with the guitar and the amp overall.”
“So I think the sound of ‘The Vallum’ is quite different in the way that some of the tracks developed.”
Robert then illustrated how theses strands came together on perhaps the most abstract track on the album.
“There’s a track called ‘Witch’ where I wanted to record the sound of the amp without any playing on the guitar. And just coincidentally, as I was doing that, it started feeding back because the guitar was plugged in and near the amp.
“I had to modulate the feedback to make sure it wasn’t going to destroy the amp and also to kind of control the sound of it.
“So I just went with it and that wound up on the record pretty much without any edits.
“So from just wanting to do this technical thing of recording the amplifier, it became effectively a performance.”
There is one additional element to the track which ultimately provided the title for the piece.
“There’s an overdub of organ on it, which is what’s called the Dream Chord, which I think was invented by La Monte Young, the avant garde musician that worked with the Velvet Underground. He recorded that chord again and again, but it’s derived from the sound of his fridge!
“It made me think about Fluxus in the 60s and that kind of scene. Then once I’d recorded it and started thinking about it again, that kind of rising hum made me think about sleep paralysis nightmares I used to have as a kid. And the sensation of having them was of this non-audible hum and everything going black and I always thought that the witch had come.
“And so thinking about that and performance art and the idea of dream and nightmare just melded into something which on the record is a very, very simple thing but has conceptual ramifications as well. And that’s sort of all over the record.”
Overall, with a wider range of instruments available, Robert was able to utilise these on the record’s pieces but that will present a challenge when performing the pieces live.
“Almost every track has overdubs on it other than guitar and taking that out live, obviously, is a different concern. So I’m going to vary them quite a lot from what’s on the record.
“I’m adding quite a lot of parts to the pieces from ‘The Vallum’ and hopefully that will make it a bit more interesting for an audience.”
Whilst necessity requires new arrangements for the solo performances, Robert also sees an element of natural development when performing the pieces live.
“Playing stuff live for an audience changes the pieces over time and I think that’s probably the case with any music.
“You try to keep yourself and your audience interested so you change and add stuff. That has happened with pieces from ‘The Rain Room’, like ‘Blues To A Boy’, which was one of the tracks that had fairly significant overdubs. So when I play that live it’s quite different as there’s added parts and changes to keep that repetitive music interesting.
“Even with Life Without Buildings, if you listen to the live record, we’re actually playing things quite differently to the way they were on ‘Any Other City’.
“I think that’s just a natural thing, that stuff changes as you play it live. It’s constantly in flux and the record is always just a sort of photograph of the music as it was at a particular time.”
‘The Vallum’ is available now on CD and download via Robert‘s Bandcamp site.
To launch the album, Robert is playing co-headline shows in Glasgow and Edinburgh with M. John Henry as follows:
The Old Hairdresser’s, Glasgow – Saturday 5 July [tickets]
Leith Depot, Edinburgh – Sunday 6 July [tickets]
- Spare Snare / The Grand Gestures - 3 July 2025
- Robert Dallas Gray - 2 July 2025
- M. John Henry - 19 June 2025
