Artist

Growing

American experimental band

Olympia, United States · Formed 2001

Growing is a music group from Olympia, United States, active since 2001. Their discography on Gatefold includes 11 records.

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Albums tracked

In collections

2001

Since

Biography

Growing started with Joe DeNardo and Kevin Doria plugging guitars into enough pedals to melt a power grid in an Olympia basement. They weren't interested in being another indie rock band. They treated the guitar like a generator, letting it hum and vibrate until the room felt like it was physically moving. If you catch the early stuff on Kranky, you can hear that specific Pacific Northwest grit—damp, heavy, and loud as hell without ever needing a drum kit to prove it. Then they moved to Brooklyn and everything got neon and glitchy. The grit turned into a jagged, digital sweat. They started messing with samplers and more aggressive structures, which pissed off some of the ambient purists who just wanted to zone out. It was a ballsy move that eventually burnt them out, leading to a long silence before they realized that their best work happened when they just let the amps breathe. The later records on Silver Current prove they finally figured out how to balance the massive drone with the organic pulse they started with in 2001.

Bio from The Clerk

The Arc of Growing

The pivots — what forced Growing to reinvent.

The Kranky Drone Years
Signed to the gold standard of ambient labels, the duo focused on pure, massive sustain and physical volume. The Sky's Run Into the Sea and The Soul of the Rainbow were built on long-form, tectonic shifts that felt like watching a mountain erode in fast forward. They relied on heavy amplification and a chain of analog effects to create a sound that was less about melody and more about the actual frequency hitting your chest. This era defined the 'Olympia sound' of the early 2000s—heavy, slow, and completely immersive.
The Digital Pivot
By the time they hit Vision Swim and Lateral, the band started incorporating more rhythmic, stuttering electronics and sharper edges. The move to Brooklyn saw them trading some of the hazy wash for grit and a more kinetic, almost aggressive energy. They started using the sampler as a primary weapon rather than a texture, which peaked with the Vice-adjacent release of Pumps! in 2010. It was a polarizing shift that flirted with noise-rock and dance structures, effectively killing the 'yoga-mat' ambient reputation they had accidentally acquired.
The Return to the Amp
After a six-year disappearance, the band resurfaced with Disorder and eventually the Humming Amps series, stripping back the digital clutter. They returned to the core concept of two guys, two guitars, and a stack of speakers, but with a more weathered, patient perspective. These records feel more lived-in, moving away from the high-concept production of the mid-2000s and back into the raw, humming electricity of their origin. It is a full-circle moment where the volume is still there, but the space between the notes finally gets to breathe.

Influences

Earth — Dylan Carlson’s minimal, heavy riffing on Earth 2 is the literal DNA for the early Growing records. You hear it in the way DeNardo and Doria hold a single chord until the overtones start to fracture and create their own melodies. They took the Sub Pop sludge and stripped it of the metal tropes.
Kevin Drumm — Drumm’s landmark 2002 album Sheer Hellish Miasma pushed Growing toward the more abrasive, electronic-noise textures seen on their middle-period records. The documented shift from 'pretty' drone to 'challenging' noise tracks directly to Drumm’s influence in the Chicago and NYC experimental scenes. It’s that specific feeling of a circuit bending until it almost breaks.
Manuel Göttsching — The interlocking, rhythmic guitar patterns on Ash Ra Tempel’s E2-E4 provided the blueprint for Growing's more kinetic work like Color Wheel. They’ve cited the German kosmische scene as the reason they started incorporating repetition as a hypnotic tool rather than just a static drone. You can hear those clean, cycling layers fighting through the fuzz on their more structured tracks.
Fennesz — Christian Fennesz proved that you could use digital processing to make a guitar sound like a crumbling sunset, a technique Growing adopted for His Return. The way they blend organic string plucks with digital 'glitch' and decay is straight out of the Mego label playbook. It’s the sound of high-end gear being used to make something feel beautifully broken.
Loren Mazzacane Connors — Growing has frequently played in the same circles as Connors, inheriting his sense of 'blues' as a skeletal, ghostly abstraction. You hear this most clearly on their Humming Amps series, where the notes are sparse and heavy with a sense of melancholic decay. It’s not about technical flash; it’s about the weight of the silence after the note dies out.