"We have a sickness it's called 'guitar pedals'!"

How the ambient music of Hammock is created a "guitar symphony" with tons of effects but no rules

- By Ellie Rogers

Twenty years into their recording career, ambient duo Hammock have emerged with their most ambitious, life-affirming and guitar-stuffed album to date. Devised by Nashville-based guitarists-cum-producers Marc Byrd and Andrew Thompson, Love in the Void is Hammock’s 12th LP.

The recording took place over 10 days at Trace Horse Studios and featured contributions from outside musicians and engineers. “When you get to a point where you feel comfortable failing in front of one another,” Byrd says, “that’s when the magic starts to happen.” Enchanting from the get-go, the largely instrumental record spirals outwards from the beat-less reverie of “Procession,” to the melodically intricate “It’s OK to Be Afraid of the Universe,” through heart-pounding EBow chaos at the epicenter of “Gods Becoming Memories” and beyond.

Dialing in from Byrd’s Breathturn home studio for this interview, we find the pair hard at work building a new track around reversed guitars. Such out-of-the-box thinking is characteristic of their approach, and years of nudging boundaries has led them to perfect practices that many would never even imagine in service of their experimental masterpieces. “We come at it from a more intuitive place than a technical place,” Byrd says. “Friends who had the training get bored with guitar a lot faster than I do. I don’t really relate to anyone who’s ever said they’re bored with the guitar, and I’ve been doing this for a long time.”