If Everything Happens For A Reason... Then Nothing Really Matters At All

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Gone Is Gone consists of Troy Sanders, singer and bassist of Mastodon, Troy Van Leeuwen, one of the guitarists of Queens of the Stone Age, Tony Hajjar, drummer of At the Drive-In, and Mike Zarin, a multi-instrumentalist and founder of Sencit Music who appeared with Van Leeuwen on Sweethead's Descent to the Surface.

"We didn't think about the logistics. We just cared about getting like-minded people working on something to see through our vision." The process of these new releases started at Bedrock Studios in Los Angeles with the idea of not setting up the traditional band instrumentation but to plug in modular synths, a ton of effects and one guitar. Gone is Gone would jam together and build upon pieces with no real beginning or end. They just wanted interesting sounds and vibes.

After the Bedrock session the ideas were brought back to their individual studios and placed in folders of parts that worked together. That was the beginning of this group of songs. Since Echolocation was the band working in a more traditional format, these groups of songs needed to be the complete anthesis to that. Very few of the songs have a standard pop arrangement and very few of them have a majority of acoustic instrumentation. The end goal was to create songs that can be played by all four them or by one in an electronic format.

With everybody's day jobs, it is hard for the band to always work, but writing and completing songs like this gives the band the opportunity to exist in different versions of itself and that is what made it interesting and pushed them along the way. When the idea felt to easy they usually scraped it for a idea that pushed them from their comfort zones. As Troy Sanders has said in interviews, "nobody in Gone is Gone needs another band," but they seem to continue to find the small gaps of time to create together or separately. With so many reasons not to do the project, they have always found ways of never giving up on it.