What If Hans Zimmer Bought a Cassette Deck? Gold Foil Hum Answers on “Pocket Dialer”

Toronto-based ambient post-rock project Gold Foil Hum introduces his debut full-length, Character Flaw – a 10-song collection imagined as alternate scores for some of his favourite films. “Every song on the record was written as an alternate cue for a scene in a movie I love,” says Gold Foil Hum’s Dan Hosh.

The lead single “Pocket Dialer” is a warped, downtempo take on Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar and “Coin Tosser,” is what Hosh imagines No Country for Old Men might have sounded like if the Coen Brothers had chosen to put music in it. The album constantly circles back to the question: what if the movies we love had taken a completely different sonic approach?

The recording process mirrored this spirit of experimentation. Hosh wrote over 100 songs for the release before narrowing them down to a cohesive 10. In the final stages, he became obsessed with cassette culture – running mixes through a Tascam Portastudio and eventually mixing the full record on a Tascam 122, affectionately described as “the Ferrari of cassette decks.”

“This album was built from all the strange, left field ideas that would come up when I was producing other artists,” Hosh explains. “Every time I did something weird sonically and the artist wanted me to pull it back, I saved it. If it scared them in some way, I knew it was good.”