Pastel to Present with G. Brenner

G. Brenner (fka Pastel) is a Los Angeles-based musician and artist. His album Brushfire, released during the pandemic, explores and metabolizes interpersonal and ecological grief.

LFEO: Why music? How did that all start for you?

G: I've actually been thinking about this a lot lately!!! I don't think there was ever a "why" for me - it was always just a natural inclination because of the environments I grew up in. Both my parents are big on music. My mom loved funk, soul, r&b, etc and had this extensive record collection that she started when she was young, maybe early teens? Possibly earlier? My family still has it to this day, too, and sometimes when we're all together we'll put on like... an Al Green record of hers and talk about her. My dad has a very voracious music appetite, too. He's super big on The Beatles and The Beach Boys and a lot of Classic Rock, but then he also introduced me to some ~weirder stuff~ as a child like FPM and Art of Noise, which in retrospect feels very formative. We would spend hours in Tower Records in Buena Park every week and leave with stacks of CD's we'd play while driving around in his old ass Volvo. He still sends me music recs all the time, too.

My sisters (4) and I are all very invested in the arts or have some creative outlet, and my parents always tried to support our passions. My youngest sister was the singer of the family growing up, so she was always in voice lessons and choirs and theater. I only started singing because she was in choirs at school and it felt like the example I was supposed to follow. Another one of my sisters does 'Ori Tahiti (Tahitian dance), which is so deeply musical, and that was the bulk of my family's life for most of my childhood. I was always surrounded by incredible musicians in the 'Ori Tahiti community, always listening and remembering and mimicking. I owe so much of my musicality to 'Ori Tahiti and the music that it's built on. To this day, the only instruments I feel comfortable saying I can play are Tahitian drums because they're the only instruments I got anywhere near proficient at.

I was also very very online from a very early age, and some of my earliest memories of the internet were pirating music on Audiogalaxy. I was very much one of those kids that made the Indie Music Internet my personality, so I was an early M.I.A. stan, a P4K BNM disciple, a Soundcloud archaeologist, etc, etc. I so badly wanted to be in the know on all things Cool in Music, not even necessarily to try and be insufferably above it all (still was though) but because I was so excited that music I discovered on the internet sounded so different to music I heard anywhere else.

ANYWAY all this is to say that music was never a "why" because it always just was!

LFEO: How did you learn to produce?

G: I'm mostly self-taught. My dad gave my sisters and me a demo CD-rom of Sony Acid Pro when I was maybe 8?? years old, and that was my first experience using a DAW. I immediately started messing around with sampling and it made me feel like a magician. I started taking producing a little more seriously when I was 15 (though it feels silly calling that serious). My best friend New and I would record covers of our favorite songs and put them on Soundcloud, and the need to keep recording and releasing music snowballed from there. I got a scholarship my senior year of high school and was able to buy my first MacBook, and that's kinda where my "career" as a musician started. I spent most of my free time learning Logic through Youtube videos and aimlessly playing around with it. I took some production and electronic composition courses later on when I was in college, too, but by that time I had already learned a big chunk of what was being taught to me. So I owe most of my production abilities to the free time I had in high school and random kids on Youtube that know way more about music production than I ever will.

LFEO: Since we met in 2017, what do you think has changed most inside yourself?

G: I think I've let go of a lot of shame and have started embracing core parts of myself that I was convinced I had to mute to be loved.

I value my physical and mental health much, much more - I'm the only one that can take care of this body, yknow? And that finally clicked in a major way for me this past year and a half or so.

I think I've always been this way, but I am now trying to be even more precious with who and what I put my energy towards, ESPECIALLY within music. I have never been the type to be very social climby or networky – it always made me feel icky and like I was betraying what I actually valued if I did move that way. That's not the me that I want to exist in the world, nor is that the type of person I want to have in my life. I don't want access and cachet to be the basis of the most important connections I have, especially creative ones. So now more than ever, I go where I feel genuinely loved, where I feel artistically engaged, where I can have the brain-tingling conversations I want to have about artistry and meaning. I try not to seek, but go where I'm called to and nowhere else, and that's been maybe the most fruitful decision I've made in my adult life so far.

LFEO: You first released music under the name Pastel. What led you to let go of that and start releasing under your own name?

G: I came up with Pastel when I was 18. When I was applying to colleges for undergrad, a lot of my classmates were worried admissions counselors were going to find dirt on them on their Facebook profiles, so a lot of people changed their names to try and be covert. I was a goody-two-shoes little nerd, so there was nothing incriminating on my Facebook anyways, but I still decided to change my name to Pastel Grunge (a portmanteau of pastel goth and soft grunge iykyk you had to be there etc etc). That nickname just kinda stuck, so I started releasing music under it. When it came time to release my first album, though, I'd grown up a lot and didn't feel any connection to that name anymore, especially because it was born from a joke and the content of my music was a lot more heavy. So I switched to my real name! It felt right and true to me.

LFEO: When you feel completely overwhelmed by the pressures of the world, how do you pivot, transmute, or digest that feeling? What is your buoy?

G: I'm not one to pivot. I think I am definitely a trasmuter and digester. I like to sit with my feelings for a while, maybe to a fault sometimes (many times.....). I pore over what overwhelms me and try to see it from every possible vantage point to get a holistic understanding. And then I usually make sense of it through a creative outlet - often music, sometimes poetry, occasionally art.

I think the buoy changes a lot for me to be honest! Lately it has been dance and exercise, which the Gabe you met in 2017 would have never said. Sometimes it's a good meal. A lot of times it's been boba. Really good plate lunch. Carne asada fries... This restaurant in Artesia called Garlic & Chives by Kristin, specifically their pomelo salad. This other restaurant in the same parking lot called Miàn, most of their menu. The lavender matcha latte with oatmilk and honey I've made almost every day for the last year. I started adding blueberry compote to it recently too and that's been revelatory. I guess the buoy is good food. Literal digestion.

LFEO: How do you approach making decisions in your life? Do you approach things logically or are you more following your emotions? I'm specifically asking this during a time where I have to make a challenging decision, so any advice is welcome.

G: I am the LAST person you should ask about making a decision. See the above answer – by the time I feel like I have that more holistic view I need, a decision is usually made for me :~) lol. I think that approach is an attempt at being logical... filtered through a whole lot of emotion. Maybe a more elegant way of saying this is... the right decision will reveal itself to you or something wink wink.

LFEO: Are you trusting? Do you trust existence, the Universe, etc?

G: I think in a lot of ways I've had to be - it's the example I grew up with. For most of my life, I was raised by a single mother with a very modest income who had to keep a family of 5 and a bunch of grandbabies afloat. When circumstances are so precarious, you have no other choice but to trust that the Universe will bounce you back to stability after every punch it throws.

I've made it this far, and the life I've lived up until this point has largely been a very fortunate one, so I guess trusting my own existence has worked well enough.

LFEO: What sounds make you feel safe?

G: Wind through trees, ocean in the distance, bug calls overlapping each other at night, life overlapping itself, natural sources of white noise. Friends laughing with me. Someone cooking in the kitchen when I wake up. The wurlitzer on Grouper's "Come Softly." The squeak of guitar strings on Sade's "By Your Side." Brushed snare and tape fuzz. Tahitian banjo. Lucy Liyou sending me a voice message starting with "Girl." or "Sister." or "Bitch."

LFEO: How do you use social media and how does that relate to your artistic practice and what are your thoughts on it all?

G: My thought is that I need to get off social media forever soooooo expeditiously.

LFEO: If someone was just diving into your work - where should they start?

G: I would definitely start with Brushfire. And this live performance seems to have resonated with a lot of people. And then maybe listen to my EP absent, just dust. And these covers. I think everything else I've made feels less essential no shade to the rest of my catalog.....

Also definitely listen to the Lucy Liyou and Maria BC albums I recently got to be a small part of. Stan them!!!

LFEO: Is there anyone surprising that has really artistically influenced you?

G: It's no surprise how much Grouper has influenced me, but I think others may be surprised that her approach to writing lyrics, especially in the work she's released more recently, is what has influenced me the most. I think people so often love her music for textural, timbral reasons alone, which is understandable because what she's actually singing gets obfuscated a lot. But I think she's an incredible lyricist if you take the time to really listen to her words. Hearing "Children," "Driving," "The way her hair falls," "Kelso (Blue sky)," etc etc for the first time... def practice-altering moments. I think about embodiment a lot with her lyrics. She doesn't use "I" a lot in her songs and instead directs *us* to look at or towards something, like an intuition guiding you toward some truth. Meaning isn't derived from what she's telling us she thinks or feels, it's derived from what she directs us to bear witness to, the accumulation and sequencing of very economical but very vivid images forming a porous but precise poetry. 

"Watch how the clouds move the water

Walking the sky through the sea

Watch how we turn in their shadows

Murdering the world in our sleep"

LFEO: Who is underrated right now that people need to know about?

G: I think Hana Stretton is a gift to this world. Her music has been so important to me for years now and I finally got to see her live earlier this year and tell her in-person. Such a special moment!! Her music is so lived-in and.... endemic is the word that comes to mind. She recorded all of Soon on a cattle farm in rural Australia that she stewards. Some songs on Soon sound as if rhythms emerge from the slow crunch of her boots on the surrounding gravel. Entire string sections will exist on the same plane as a cricket's chirp or the brush of her leg against a bush. It's almost as if the environment is dictating the structures her songs take. Her voice is buttttttttttterrrrry smooth, too, often stacked into dense clouds of glorious harmony. I cannot preach her gospel enough!

LFEO: Do you struggle with wanting to give up on creating? How do you keep the spark?

G: Constantly, especially after releasing my last album. The Brushfire rollout was super difficult to make happen, or want to make happen, at the peak of a global pandemic, and it knocked the wind out of me for a long while.

Creating isn't always fun or joyous, especially with the music I find myself making most of the time. It's hard writing and making about death and grief constantly, but that's what I've been compelled to do for years, and I have to honor that.

One of the bigger adult lessons I've slowly accepted over the past couple years is that the musical environments I grew up pedestalizing, and hoping my music would have its moment within, have changed so much so fast, if not outright collapsed. The type of music journalism that the wide-eyed baby version of me grew up dreaming about being the subject of just does not exist in the same way anymore. Many of my favorite labels that I had always wanted to be a part of in some way are calling it quits left and right. Touring is often a net loss for smaller artists like myself, and it's a massive physical and spiritual task that I don't have much of an interest in throwing myself into in a major way, anyways. Streaming is evil, too, as we all know. And I don't mean to imply that these are the only avenues to make music work for you, me, or anyone for that matter, but they have been a part of my path up until this point. Now, that path is much less hospitable and recognizable, and I often feel pretty lost and want out.

But I also think my priorities have changed a lot, and I don't really desire a Big Indie Career in the same way anymore. I've been finding much more joy in music in other ways: lending my voice to other people's projects, singing with Pupu 'Ori for their performances, practicing for those performances where I get to make music with my beautiful, talented, loving friends for hours at a time without any of the mechanisms of a Career™️ bogging me down. I've really loved being a part of the fabric of a bigger musical project much more than being the star of my own solo act because collaboration requires you to create moments of intuitive, intimate connection with other musicians, which is so fulfilling. As a singer, where your instrument is your body, you have to show and express very internal parts of yourself through voice, and your collaborators have to learn those intimate parts of you. They're working with and molding themselves to your body and your spirit real-time. It feels like a sacred level of trust and understanding from others that I don't get anywhere else! So perhaps that spark I required... and sometimes found myself Looking For... just so happened to come from... Each Other........ he he he he he he he hehehehhehhehehehehe.