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“UNFELT LOSS” - GUN OUTFIT
By: Ali Mehraban RamirezOut of Range was released in 2017, and was my first introduction to the currently Los Angeles-based band Gun Outfit. From then until now, 9 years later, my listening sense has moved in a certain direction and has taken up new desires. Naming that process as evolution risks a value-laden perspective of process. My movements away from music in the vein of Gun Outfit, toward music in the vein of, lets say, Cecil Taylor are not a shedding moment - one enclosure left to shrivel up for another - for nothing is left behind. When music aligns, or registers, with the immediate conjunctures, they stick. When they don’t, any other thing is there to stick in its place. Each successive coat primes the next in the series in a necessary way. The movements away from Gun Outfit were made possible by Gun Outfit.
As a practical approach, the Gun Outfit project felt prime as a sound and practice to approach. They picked up on a strain of music which valued the sense of openness, of multipolarity, of the moments of indeterminability. The music of the Out of Range Gun Outfit found a way to import the open terrains of possibility and flight into the tight rhythmic structures of straight ahead punkatenations. Daniel Swire’s drumming intervenes to cohere a sound which you could just as well imagine existing as unstable and without a center. His contributions interven in the music by containing and forming the shape of the melodic interplay. This holding together of possibilities never dimmed the life of those centerless possibilities.
In the time following my discovery of Gun Outfit, I played through various approaches to music as an intransigent practice of the social. I played music alone (imagining others), I played music with others (imagining other others), I played music with certain commitments and debts and I played music with total lack of promise. In this time I often used Gun Outfit as a yardstick with which to measure the depth of sound and the fertility of its terrain. And even as certain tendencies stepped in front of others, the existence of the Gun Outfit sound comprised one clear and distinct horizon positioned across from another, less discernable horizon that brought its two sets so close in value that they practically collapse as an axis, and extended into all directions. Between these horizons is all forms of music produced to be continuously productive and not just continue to be reproduced. With this distinction I am pointing to the archived lives of bands like Gun Outfit, which become part of the world of archived lives of countless improvisational music moments from videos of jam sessions at the Velvet Lounge in Chicago with giants of free jazz/creative music, to the deep body of religiously taped iterations the Grateful Dead left behind. Their membership in this archive (which lives and breathes) is part of their distinction.
In the years after the 2017 release of Out of Range, I came back repeatedly to a live video of Gun Outfit playing the Dundee Lodge Campout, where they tune, they make “mistakes”, the play with a sense of immediate invention, and the visceral dynamics of togetherness. For years, this 40 min set was one of the only documents that pointed to the still beating heart of Gun Outfit, which I knew I could looking toward for years. It also described a model of performing which seemed open to the world, and a soundscape which I wanted to hear grow. In the time between that video and now, I’ve seen Gun Outfit a few times, and the spirit of that recorded performance was carried on by those live, unfolding performances I was witness to. That spirit could also be traced backwards across the 10 or so years between the Dundee Lodge video and the earliest accessible footage I could find of them. That body of live recordings was a monument to slow shifts and transformations, to never investing too much into a style or genre and easily spreading out into many worlds.
The new song “Unfelt Loss” from the upcoming album Process and Reality, along with its lyric music video, comes across rich with intention and dense with a multi-decade confidence. It becomes apparent listening to this song, that Gun Outfit has always been a project of language where their practice of writing conjoins with the more overtly musical elements to feel out a range that ranges. Gun Oufit, for this reason, has made valuable contributions to the project of pop music. Locating the “pop” in this song is acknowledging its scale of language. Pop is a granular logic using the unit of the individual to move up and down a multi-determinate totality. The institution of language is comprised of different logics with different units and different scales of passage across this totality. Gun Outfit seems to have a fidelity to this institution as a whole, while rooted in a strategic position from which they mount their critique. Songs describing the attempts of squandering life with law and order, the mostly rewarding difficulties of love, the earth as a stage and as a living being, the transindividual worlds of death drives and stuck flows. Their passage up and down the scales of totality comes across as joyful noise, where different registers of life (as seen from language) can feel aligned by a propulsion of rhythm and hooks, or the more washed psychedelia of near dissolution. Gun Outfit operates from a position to see these dynamics of individual life as full of worlds, treating them as objects of comfort as much as objects of questioning.
February 15, 2026