Guiding Light

By Sean Maldjian, Contributor
Intro by Callula Hart, Contributor

Photo provided by, Guiding Light

Meet Guiding Light

Guiding Light offers a dark psychedelic discography, with engrossing lyrics you're going to want to listen to on repeat in an effort to truly grasp. If you're looking for some haunting tunes with some bewitching vocals, Guiding Light has definitely got you covered. In our latest interview, we chat with them about inspiration, elevators, and bats. Check it out.

Would you rather…

be trapped in an elevator alone, or with two other people? Who would you want to be trapped with?

Chuck: Alone forever.

Jason: We’re all gonna die.

Do you have a guiding light? What is it?

Chuck: No.

Jason: Making things. Letting other people know however they feel isn’t weird. For some reason, I’m really interested in communicating with other people, as effectively and entertainingly as possible. As a kid, art and music, and books were the most important things in the world to me. I’d like to contribute to that big pile of human experience.

Who was a significantly influential family member growing up?

Chuck: I’m gonna say the kid I had as a teenager continues to be influential.

Jason: All of them. My father was a butcher from the Bronx who left to become a Trappist Monk. This and my mom’s devotion to religion had a big impact on me. Mostly to make it impossible for me to take any organized religion seriously, but their religiosity had an effect on me. I can’t help but think on that level, about everything.

What was the creative inspiration behind your 2020 release ‘Weird Pains’?

Chuck: Pop, pain, and Leonard Cohen.

Jason: Pains, weird ones.

Do you have a piece of musical gear that you have been really into lately?

Chuck: I’m fond of the Voicelive 3 Extreme + MPC Live combo for performance. I can program the harmonies via midi (I have at 20-30 on some tracks, which is lol) so I don’t need backing vocal tracks on stage. It’s not a perfect solution to my record —> stage woes, but it certainly helps.

Jason: Computers. I’m into computers. I like to spend hours painstakingly arranging tiny pieces of audio, it’s soothing. I like to place contact mics on things and bang the with mallets, too. That’s my pallet these days, samples from around the house. I think there is there sound of a mallet hitting my desk chair on the record.

If you had control of all bats on the earth what would you do with them?

Chuck: Train them to teach people to be nice to each other.

Jason: I would train them to land on me and be my clothes. I’d like to be swaddled by their leathery wings.

What is the creative process between the two of you?

Chuck: I hate working on new ideas in real-time with other musicians, so we work well together. Whoever comes up with the initial sketch sends it to the other, and then we keep bouncing it back and forth until it’s unrecognizable. There’s a pretty large creative overlap, but I hate Van Halen and certain people will never convince me otherwise.

Jason: We like to tear each other’s demos apart. We engage in a lot of creative destruction. We also bolster each other’s self-esteem. When one person is feeling worthless, the other picks up the slack. It’s a tag team in that way.

If you had to cover the score from a film which would it be? Why?

Chuck: If I had to: True Stories or Werkmeister Harmonies.

Jason: I would like to make a trip hop cover of the score to Lawrence of Arabia. I was just playing around with tympani samples I made from ripping the youtube of it actually.

What has been the brightest moment throughout all of 2020? Why?

Chuck: I got into a PhD program. And New York felt like New York for a minute, which was a total delight.

Jason: The summer of 2020 in Brooklyn was beautiful. We’d survived the first wave of the pandemic, all the cops were busy being defunded and there was no governance. Every night there was a march / rave. There was a real sense of community. The wealthy neighborhoods were over run with poorer folks, people openly smoked pot and drank on the streets. New York really took care of itself, during which time we kept reading articles about how dangerous our city was, but it was pure propaganda. There was a camaraderie going on.