The sun sets as we walk behind Trinity United Church and up the handicap ramp to a plain white door, which is propped open. On the wall beside it is a campaign sign for Donald Drumpf. This gives us pause. Tentatively, we enter, and heave a sigh of relief to find––not a right-wing strategy meeting––just MaryLiz Bender (drums, vocals) of Twin Limb, tattooed and clad in black. She’s unloading drum equipment for their set later that night. We’re soon joined by Lacey Guthrie (accordion, vocals), who speaks in dulcet tones, and Kevin Ratterman (guitar), with his rat’s nest of dark hair.
Listening to Twin Limb reminds me that any aural experience is also inherently physical. It suggests a place, it demands a body. Their EP Anything Is Possible And Nothing Makes Sense opens with a dog’s bark and the click of drum sticks, and the long reverb on these sounds transports you immediately: this is music for cavernous spaces, for feeling small. In conversation, the three members of Twin Limb joked about losing their bodies. Given what I’ve just said about their art, that’s a paradoxical urge; but later that night, we’d sit in the pews of Trinity Church witnessing them achieve it. They arranged themselves in a triangle: Guthrie and Bender seated with their hulking instruments, Ratterman behind them, stooped over his guitar. Each roll of Bender’s toms seemed to push and pull Guthrie’s accordion, whose droning chords clattered against Ratterman’s guitar strings, whose chiming tones impelled Bender back into motion, and they rocked to-and-fro as the sounds rose. They didn’t so much lose their bodies as merge to form a new one, a trinity of swaying limbs.
During our interview, the Louisville, KY three-piece was earnest, in awe not just of one another, of their shared dynamic and the music that comes from it.
Tell us about the origins of Twin Limb.
Lacey Guthrie: So, we’ve all been in music forever. I met MaryLiz at a party at her house. After we hit it off, we secretly found each others’ Soundclouds, and after a while of courting each other musically, decided to get in a room and play together. We did it once and we were like… we’re doing this all the time now. We started Twin Limb, and we saved up our pennies to go record with Kevin [Ratterman], who’s an excellent producer and engineer in Louisville. He owns a studio called La La Land. And we kept him.
Kevin Ratterman: I had not heard the band, but I had heard everybody was talking about them… I tried to make it out to one of the shows right before we recorded, but I’m glad I didn’t, because they just came in and set up and we started recording and I was just… head––floor––against the wall, jaw on the ground. It was amazing.
LG: I just pictured what that would look like. [laughs]
KR: It was interesting, because I had just opened a studio in Louisville; I bought a big warehouse and spent six months building a recording studio inside of it with the idea of just being a producer and engineer. I’d played in bands and toured a ton throughout my life, and was like, “Maybe I’ll keeping doing that a little bit on the side, but like, now I’m gonna do this.” And then they came in, and it was like, “Alright, everything’s not gonna happen the way I’d planned.”
LG: Sorry!
That’s love, you can’t plan it.
KR: So they started playing, and then I just kind of like, lightly started adding things, you know, and I was like “I have this idea… it might be terrible… just tell me to stop,” and they were like no, that’s great.
LG: Everything’s like, “Yes! Yes! Perfect! Awesomeness!”
KR: And then it worked out perfectly, because at the end of the session, they had a show booked, and so they said “Why don’t you just come play with us at that show?”
LG: Kevin showed up in a beautiful dress. I remember getting a text from you and you were like, “You guys… you’re sure you don’t mind if I show up in a dress? Because it’s actually happening.” And we’re like, “Yeah!” And he said, “Ladies, I feel fine.”
MaryLiz Bender: With a little dancer emoji… and that’s when we knew.
This is a tangent, but it comes back around, so bear with me: in my hometown there was one winter where––for several weeks––we had a foot of snow every two days. I was just discovering OK Computer [by Radiohead]. Night after night I shoveled our long driveway, listening to that record again and again; now, every time I hear it I’m back there in the snow and the dark doing this lonely, methodical work. To me, it’s the perfect setting for that album. And so, back to you: Anything Is Possible has a transporting sound, an atmospheric sound––and it makes me wonder, what’s the ideal environment for listening to Twin Limb?
LG: I guarantee we have three amazing ideas that are slightly different.
MLB: I’m hopeful it’s like, from a space shuttle looking at the earth from afar.
LG: I would say headphones on in the woods at night.
KR: I always imagine lots of wind. So, at the top, sort of high above everything… in some place with lots of wind… looking down, seeing things as one instead of seeing things as individual.
Speaking of which, the video that you put out for “Don’t Even Think” created a strange conflation or blurring of your identities: it’d fade out, you’d change places and instruments––your bodies would be duplicated and split in half. Where did that idea come from, and why you think it’s fitting for the band?
KR: The original intent for that video wasn’t exactly duplicated the way that we envisioned it… it came out great, but the original intent was that we would shoot it like that, where we were all playing each other’s instruments, and then it would be edited together frame by frame so quickly that you wouldn’t be able to see any of us at all, it would just be this blob of movement. But that would’ve just taken forever…
LG: Yeah, and we did it on a budget too. With BreakerBox productions, they’re amazing.
KR: But they’re the same concept. The idea translated, which is that we each, obviously––because we only live in three dimensions––can only play one instrument at a time, but really it’s the community of our energy that makes the sounds. It was trying to get away from the from the individualism of each person––
LG: Yeah, get rid of our bodies. We don’t want them.
MLB: We don’t really care about them. We’re ready for robot arms and legs.
KR: And I’ve always also loved bands with mystery… we live in a culture where it’s all about the face… I’ve always loved bands like Tool, where it’s like, “If the lead singer of Tool walked down the street, I would have no idea who they are.” Keeping that element of mystery has always been exciting: it not being about any one of us individually.
Do you actually trade instruments during sets?
LG: We used to back in the old days.
MLB: The pre-Kevin days, yeah, because there were songs where we wanted a more atmospheric guitar sound, so I’d pick up the guitar. Or [Lacey] would write something on the guitar, so she would play guitar and I would just play drums.
LG: I would stand up and play a floor tom very badly [laughs]. Now we don’t have to do that. But I think we all kind of vibe off each other, and whenever we’re writing, we’re certainly all giving each other ideas for what we could be doing. So we’re focused collectively on the sound, instead of just being in our own worlds where we don’t have any windows.
Do you feel you “fit in” with the local music scene in Kentucky?
LG: Louisville is like its own state in Kentucky. The Louisville music scene is amazing and full of variety. Lexington has amazing bands as well. Outside of those two places I don’t really know…
KR: Louisville’s always been a very safe place. Everybody’s encouraged to do their own thing, it’s always a very honest place. It’s almost frowned upon to… to have a sound, or like, be copying something. So in that sense, yeah, I think we fit that mold by doing our thing and not thinking about it too much. There’s so much variety, from like, Slint, to My Morning Jacket, to Days of the New, NRBQ, Houndmouth…Rachel’s… it’s so all over the place.
LG: And the collaborations we do… we just worked with a friend of ours who’s a hip-hop artist. I’ve played on some old-time things.
MLB: It’s a great music community.
KR: Well, the three Louisville bands that are playing [Savannah Stopover] are so different: White Reaper, Quiet Hollers, and us. We’re all friends.
LG: It’s a nice portrait…. The White Reaper kids used to come to my old pop punk band’s shows at their Chestnut Street house. I met Chadwick at Mag Bar, where he bartended, and where we played our first show with them. That’s local, it’s a Louisville thing.
What made you decide to remix “Long Shadow” as “Longer Shadow”?
KR: Just for fun, I was actually going on vacation I had just––
LG: Oh, you did that in Mexico!
KR: I had just gotten Ableton Push. We were releasing the single, and so we were making a tape, and we were like, “We need something else to put on the B-Side,” and we didn’t want to release any of the songs from the record yet…and so I was just like, “Oh, I’ll just do a little remix and we’ll put that on the B-Side.” But then we liked it so much that we decided to put it on the EP. Originally it was gonna be the hidden track on the EP, but then we wrote a hidden track that we liked better [laughs]
LG: We kind of do whatever we want––
MLB: We actually did a super cool, stripped down acoustic version of the remix. It was a last minute decision for a radio show.
LG: We were doing it, and I was like, trying to chop and screw my own voice.
I think that’s fun, when the art is never done.
KR: We definitely will always have that mentality, that whatever song is on the record, that’s just where that song is at that point in time.
LG: He just wrote new guitar parts for “Don’t Even Think,” like three days ago.
MLB: You did?
LG: They’re so good!
KR: We’re always changing. It’s fun.
Twin Limb live at Trinity United Methodist Church in Savannah, GA. Photo by Will Cuneo
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Twin Limb’s debut EP Anything Is Possible and Nothing Makes Sense is out now.
