Like many bands of this moment, Gang Gang Dance’s music forms a sort of four-way love-rhombus between punk, jam band, folk, and Jamaican “riddim”. The latter trope is in fact the one most embraced by the band, as evidenced by their recent autobiographical album/film, Retina Riddim, in which DeGraw exhumed archival sound and video clips from the band’s practice history and placed them within an explosive visual score reminiscent of Len Lye, Stan Brakhage, or Silt.
This fall, the band will return from a concert in Trinidad benefiting the construction of a transportation system enabling rural mountain kids to get to school — and subsequent gigs in Spain, the UK, and Japan — to begin touring in support of their new, as-yet-untitled album. “It will have our dirty live sound a bit more,” Bougatsos says. Acknowledging that their music often defies boundaries, DeGraw puts it differently: “I have never successfully been able to describe our music. I would just say that its equal parts outer space and inner space.” Indeed, no matter where in the universe their music will take Gang Gang Dance, it seems evident that it will take them far.

