Gun Outfit Process and Reality

Gun Outfit is a long running lifestyle band out of Los Angeles, California. For two decades the group has been making unclassifiable underground rock music that strives to remain humble and true to life. This has been documented on several releases through fine imprints like Post Present Medium, Paradise of Bachelors and Joyful Noise. Beginning as a crude duo, they have solidified into a crack five piece; a post punk band playing experimental folk rock with a local flavour. The sound has grown mellower, more expansive and more intimate in response to the schizophrenic environment in which we live.
Process and Reality is their most ambitious record yet. Self-recorded over the course of a month on a ranch in Pine Flat, California while a forest fire burned ten miles away, the album is an apocalyptic improvisation on a passing world. A series of sonic landscapes and a set of discrete and inviting songs, Process and Reality is maelstrom of vibe grounded by lyrical engagement and limited means. Dulcimer, autoharp, keyboard, melodica, sitar and a variety of other instruments in novel arrangements widen the sound, a collaborative approach to songwriting broadens the emotional scope and intuitive mixing and a commitment to analogue gear gives the production a subtle mystical resonance.

Principle songwriters Dylan Sharp and Carrie Keith grew up in rural Washington state, forming Gun Outfit in Olympia in 2006. Daniel Swire has been drumming in the band since 2010; on this record he plays a variety of other instruments as well. Multi-instrumentalist Henry Barnes (of Amps For Christ) joined in 2015, but this record emphasizes his virtuosity on his homemade instruments and electronics. Kayla Cohen has been playing bass in the band since 2019. Other collaborators - Chris Cohen, Warren Lee, Danny Sasaki and others - have all left their mark on this majestic double LP.

Process and Reality takes its name from the book by the philosopher AN Whitehead, who articulated a metaphysic that emphasizes the primacy of intuition, experience and creativity and the inherent sociality of the unfolding of being. Gun Outfit was inspired by this work in the sense that it is a grounded critique of the vulgar cartesian materialism which remains in charge, pretending to be certain of the nature of our world. In order to preserve what is meaningful in our culture, we must resist technological encroachment and use those tools which respect and encourage our way of life. Music is a gift, because of the mysterious way it carries meaning. Process and Reality is an attempt to give and preserve meaning through obscure methods.