Brad Gowland reflects on group dynamics, Ann Arbor basements, and rejecting algorithmic art.

Transmission 417: Interview with Fling II

Fling ii runs out of Ann Arbor, though its members scatter across New Orleans, New York, Baltimore, and Detroit. The band started during a rough patch for its founder, who called a few friends out to Willis Sound in Willis, Michigan for a weekend with no agenda. They walked out with 150GB of tape and a first record.

Title: 3
Artist: fling ii
Release Date: 2026-08-21
Genres: Experimental Music, Krautrock, Psychedelic Rock
Label: We Are Busy Bodies
Description: Read our interview with fling ii about their LP 3 on We Are Busy Bodies, covering Ann Arbor basements, motorik beats, and hardware synths.

There is no rehearsal, no fixed lineup, only an open call to show up when a session gets booked. Six or so players, mics running for twenty minutes to an hour while a groove finds its own shape. Most records take a year to edit; 3 didn’t. Releasing on August 21, 2026, via We Are Busy Bodies, it is closer to a transcript of the room than a built record, and it is the strongest thing they have made.

The Neu! (read our interview with Michael Rother) hypnosis is still there, along with a new age streak picked up during a long recovery from leg surgery, and a cosmic country turn born from a busted pedal steel someone happened to fix mid session. A fourth album is already in editing, a fifth session already booked.

How did fling ii come together in Ann Arbor?

It really only has a home in Ann Arbor because I live here – the rest of the band is scattered all over, New Orleans, New York, Baltimore, Detroit.

Really fling ii came to be in Ann Arbor and not the many other places I’ve lived because of boring stuff, space and convenience. Ann Arbor is a small enough town that I finally have space to live in a house with a basement where I can play drums, and some space to leave all my synths set up. It’s also small enough that I can stay sane, I think I need some space and some greenery to keep my mind running steady. If I don’t take care of myself, I don’t spend any time on music.

I starded fling ii during a very bummed out period for me, I called a couple buddies and I said “hey, come on out to Ann Arbor and I’m gonna rent a studio and we’ll pretend we’re a real band”. So I called this studio, Willis Sound in Willis, Michigan, and said “hey would I be wasting your time or my money if me and my buddies came in for a weekend?” And they were like, “no absolutely not. That’s why we’re here.” I thought we’d maybe get a track or two out of that, but I took home a hard drive with 150GB of tape on it and made the whole first record. The thing sorta took off by accident, but it was a rocket.

How does being a “part-time” collective shape your writing process?

The band is basically this loose orbit of all of my friends. Most of them have day jobs, some of them have kids. To keep the band rolling I kind of have to keep the stakes low, like “okay we have a recording session coming up. All I need is for you to show up, there is no time commitment for practice. Simply be in the room when we roll.” That both works from the angle of getting the guys to do it with me, and it’s honestly the root of our whole sound.

Sometimes fling ii tracks start from sketches I make in my home studio with my synths and pedals and gadgets, but a lot of the tracks start in the studio just noodling. Usually we have six or so players at a session, and I’ll grab one or two of them and say “let’s start a groove”, maybe drums or bass and synth. Once we’re cooking on something a bit, we call the rest of the guys in from having coffee or a beer and just let the mics run while we feel our way through it for a while, maybe 20 minutes on the short end, 60 on the long end.

Some tracks I listen back to the tape, like mago, and that is basically just how it happened in the room. Some tracks I really just strip for parts, layer the stems from a few different takes, cut and loop things, and the tracks really fall into place later in the studio.

Did the local scene push you toward this sound, or away from it?

I don’t feel like there’s a huge local scene or hunger for krautrock specifically, but I think being in the cultural orbit of Detroit there is a lot of local interest for like, exploratory electronic music and what I think of as little-e-experimental music. As in, not Experimental music as a genre, but any kind of music that is intuitive, curious, unscripted, and intending to try things that might not work. There’s a great scene of local, pretty amateur hardware-style techno around greater Detroit. What I love about it is the super open scene, anybody will book anybody, and the curious ears of people at the shows. I’ve played shows where I’m doing some ambient loop work on my Korg Poly61, and I’m immediately followed by a half hour of industrial noise, then somebody playing Madlib style rap instrumentals off an Oktatrak.

So it’s not like, toward any particular sound, but feeling open and encouraged about trying whatever feels right.

When did you first discover krautrock, and what drew you in? What non-krautrock influences shaped your sound?

The very first moment was Richard Murphy, one of our guitarists, showing me Hallogallo by Neu! when we were probably 17. As a drummer I loved that hypnotic playing style. My hands as a drummer are pretty slow, but my strength as a player has always been my timebase and my attention to detail. That kind of playing and thinking in music just intuitively suits me.

The musical inflection point that really pushed my thinking toward what would become fling ii was in 2017 when I had a couple major surgeries on my left leg and I couldn’t walk for a while. I bought a Moog Mother 32, and my buddies Jimmy and Tony both got little semi modular boxes too. We started wiring everything together and jamming really ad hoc, and I was listening to a lot of Suzanne Ciani, Mort Garson, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, Laurie Spiegel. That kind of boundary between electronic music and new age means a lot to me too.

How did cosmic country and motorik rhythms end up together on 3?

The mix of styles is partly my interests as sort of the “curator” of the band, we don’t really write music ahead of time so I don’t think of myself as our “writer” or “composer”. But it’s also just the influences, interests, strengths of the other players I rope together for the sessions. The country angle really only folded into the sound because of Dave Van Dusen, who plays guitars for us.

At our recording session for 2, Dave found a pedal steel in the studio. The guys who run the studio were like “oh yeah sorry, it doesn’t work”, but Dave knows everything about guitars so of course he was like “I can probably fix this”. He got it working and we ran it through a delay pedal and we were all going crazy over that sound. But yeah – it was not planned, we were in the studio, we found the thing, it just unfolded.

But there’s definitely lots of crossover now in that ambient, kosmische, country venn diagram. Bands like North Americans, Prairiewolf, I’m sure there are a hundred others. For me it’s not super heady to mash the two together, it’s just the gravitational center of the sound we get from the crew that makes it into the room for every session we have.

You talk about “Desire Optimization” almost like a monster stalking the album, was there a specific moment that crystallized that feeling for you?

That’s sort of a joke, and sort of very serious. Something that eats at me a lot when people talk about AI is what the point of AI-created anything is. The idea of “desire optimization” to me is this very consumption-oriented mindset. That consuming things is where value is exchanged, how we communicate what is important to us. When you only think about consumption, you inevitably see the time and resources of production as drag on how fast or cheap you can make something.

But for me, fling ii is entirely about production, and the end product is sort of incidental. The point of the thing is that I call my friends more, I see my friends more, I go to bed thinking about how I played music today, I wake up thinking about a patch to try on my modular. Making tracks and making albums is a nice way to put a bow on thoughts I’ve been having, or to share it with other people, but honestly it’s not why I do it. So back to “desire optimization” – that impulse of “how do we create exactly what people want? How do we make it faster? How do we make it cheaper?”, it’s just orthogonal thinking to what makes the most valuable parts of my life worth living.

This applies to friendship, my day job, all of it. If you want art without experience, it’s nothing. If you want friends you love without years of doing dumb stuff and helping each other and forgiving each other, well, I don’t think that’s possible.

You recorded the core of the album in just two days before an extended mixing and production period, what happens in those two days that’s different from a longer session? Did any of the original two-day material stay untouched?

I usually take about a year to mix and edit after we record. It’s like Grayfolded, but the source material isn’t the Dead and the output is kind of idiosyncratic ersatz American krautrock. Some of the tracks are super edited, there’s some small riff I fixate on as I listen back, or maybe I even layer takes from a few different tracks to get something to fit in place how I like.

Our newest record, 3, is by far the most raw and untouched material we’ve done. Like mago, which to me is the centerpiece of the record, that’s really pretty much how that one happened in the room.

How does something like a parking lot or gas station fruit basket become music?

I have again backed myself into the corner of saying something that I thought was clever or funny and having to explain it, but I guess the line I’m trying to draw there is that fling ii songs are really about anything specific, they’re this momentary amalgamation of a million weird little things that feel vaguely emotive or curious for a few minutes. We don’t do any sort of focused lyrical storytelling, there’s no “lore” to our personal lives to decode, the songs aren’t instrumental concepts to guide you on a journey. They’re like parking lots or stuff on shelves in the store, you walk past them or through them and maybe it jogs your memory or your mind wanders to a place and you feel something unexpected. Like seeing the moon in the daytime over a parking lot and appreciating that the sky is beautiful even in kind of a dumb and wasted place. It’s the same impulse behind not naming the songs after anything concrete – I wouldn’t want to push anyone where I think you should go, I’d rather hear where you went on your own.

Any non-musical artists who shaped this record’s sense of space?

I read a few wonderful and odd books while I was mixing the record, Alváro Enrigue’s Now I Surrender, Hiroko Oyamada’s The Factory, and Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket all stick out. I think those books all share this uncomfortable sense of living through the end an era or a world, and trying to find your footing in a shifting and strange reality with geography and values you don’t fully understand.

Did the album take you anywhere unexpected?

It’s weird – I remember a distinct feeling of disappointment when I left the studio. Like I had a million ideas I didn’t try, and the ones I did try I didn’t feel like I did justice to.

And poof, this is the record I edited the least.

Does finishing this triptych close a chapter, what’s next?

The triptych bit in the press copy was honestly just words sounding nice and playing with different words that reference the number 3 or triples. We’ve got a fourth album recorded and in editing, we’ve got a fifth recording session on the calendar. I’m so stoked for all of it. I feel like I’m only getting started.

Photos courtesy of © Fling II

Matteo Damiani

Matteo Damiani is an Italian photographer and author. Curator of the sites Retrofuturista.com; weirditaly.com; china-underground.com and others