How Sparklehorse helped to spawn bedroom pop
Championed by college radio, Sparklehorse emerged as a cult favourite of the mid-1990s indie rock scene in America. The brainchild of multi-instrumentalist Mark Linkous, the band became noted for its incorporation of psychedelic and country rock influences. On a much deeper level, though, Linkous’ group have a claim to the origins of DIY bedroom pop.
For much of the 20th-century rock scene, the term ‘DIY’ was often reserved exclusively for fuzzy punk bands and grassroots record labels releasing obscure rock and grunge records to a limited audience. On the contrary, even pop music can be branded as ‘DIY’ nowadays thanks to the advent of free and easily accessible music-making software. With Sparklehorse, the term broke free of its punk rock shackles, embracing wider music scenes and spawning bedroom pop.
As a genre, bedroom pop is fairly self-explanatory. Characterised usually by young musicians making music independently using computer software and cheap recording equipment from their homes, bedroom pop is expansive and varied. Though the roots of the genre could be traced back to jungle-pioneer A Guy Called Gerald, who created his defining track ‘Voodoo Ray’ using primitive home computer software from his bedroom, it was Sparklehorse who championed home recording throughout their career.
Linkous had always taken an individualistic DIY attitude towards music making, both in content and production. On Sparklehorse’s debut album, Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot, the band split the recording between David Lowery’s Sound of Music recording studio and Linkous’s home studio in Virginia. For the follow-up, Linkous decided to compose the album independently, using cheap Tascam DA-88 digital recorders from the comfort of his home. It is with this album, Good Morning Spider, that the lineage of bedroom pop begins.
The deliberately rough-and-ready recording aesthetic of Good Morning Spider came to define the signature sound of Sparklehorse. Not content with recording the album himself, Linkous also recorded the vast majority of the instrumental tracks and took charge of production and mixing. Understandably, given how rare a practice this was for the time, Capitol Records was apprehensive about allowing Linkous to have complete creative control over so much of the album, with the musician revealing to TapeOp back in 1999, “We had to trick them into it”.
Much of modern bedroom pop centres around keyboards and small home synthesisers to create the bulk of its material. It is fitting, therefore, that the Sparklehorse album featured heavy usage of Linkous’ home keyboard. Talking through the multitude of keys used throughout the album, he explained, “I wanted this record to be more keyboard-based than the last one, just soundwise”. The multi-instrumentalist used a varied mix of Optigan keyboards, Wurlitzer and Magnus Cathedral organs and some “little Casios… the only pro keyboard I have is one of those Roland JV heads,” he continued, “but you’ve got to get so inside of those things to make them sound not so shiny and pro.”
Linkous’ desire for the album to sound “not so shiny and pro” is a testament to his unique musical mind. Again, the only music that had strived to sound DIY prior to Sparklehorse were obscure and often overlooked punk rock groups; Linkous managed to successfully drag fuzzy DIY recordings into the mainstream of indie rock and wider alternative music. Although the band didn’t receive quite the same recognition as their peers, Linkous’ innovative recording techniques would characterise many future indie rock movements and, of course, bedroom pop.
