Golden Retriever (band)

Golden Retriever is an American musical duo from Portland, Oregon, United States.

Jonathan Sielaff (formerly of Au) and Matt Carlson both played in the experimental music community in the Pacific Northwest in the mid-2000s. Sielaff played with Carlson's band Parenthetical Girls. They founded Golden Retriever in 2008 and began releasing albums on cassette and CD-R. In 2012 the group signed with Thrill Jockey and released Occupied with the Unspoken; Seer followed in 2014.

The Portland Mercury has described the band as follows: "Golden Retriever create polyphonic music from monophonic instruments. The bass clarinet and the analog modular synthesizer are generally both capable of playing only one note at a time. Starting from this point of pure melody, Golden Retriever then find ways to turn melody into harmony... to make live electronic music that is remarkably rich in textural details and almost symphonic in its use of layering. Recorded live, but then heavily edited in Carlson’s basement studio... the four songs presented here were typically performed as 25 or 30 minutes pieces. For the album, the songs were distilled into shorter passages where the original structure remains, but each section within the overall song has been shortened."

Members

• Jonathan Sielaff - bass clarinet
• Matt Carlson - analog synthesizer

Discography

• Golden Retriever (Root Strata, 2010)
• Static Rain (Gift Tapes, 2010)
• Golden Retriever 2 (Bucket Factory, 2010)
• Arda Viraf (Agents of Chaos, 2011)
• Emergent Layer (NNA Tapes, 2011)
• Light Cones (Root Strata, 2012)
• Occupied with the Unspoken (Thrill Jockey, 2012)
• Seer (Thrill Jockey, 2014)
• Rotations (Thrill Jockey, 2017)