THE NEXT GHOST FUNK ORCHESTRA STARTS WITH “OCOTILLO”
There is something appropriately patient about “Ocotillo.” The plant that gives Ghost Funk Orchestra’s new song its name can spend long periods looking almost dead before the right conditions bring it suddenly back to life.
– WORDS BY CJ
For Seth Applebaum, the songwriter and producer at the center of Ghost Funk Orchestra, it became an unusually direct metaphor for an experience the band had survived years earlier. The song emerged from what Applebaum has described as the roughest tour of the band’s career, although it took a long time before that experience became creatively useful.
“It takes a while for me to spin something uncomfortable or traumatic into something creative because in the moment all my energy is focused on just getting through the situation,” Seth says. “In the case of ‘Ocotillo’ it took a couple years before I had a creative spark from reflecting on that tour.” Even then, the song did not begin as an attempt to document what happened. The instrumental existed first and accumulated its meaning gradually.
“The instrumental wasn’t always intended to become a direct reference,” Seth explains, “but over time as I was working on it, its meaning slowly revealed itself.”
The same was true of the ocotillo itself. Seth was initially drawn less to its symbolic possibilities than simply to what it looked like: a strange, severe plant capable of appearing both fragile and imposing in a landscape designed to test anything trying to survive inside it.
“I was inspired by the visual of the plant before I drew any real connections between it and us,” he says. “It’s a very striking and almost imposing figure in a different way than a tall cactus. That said, it was easy to relate to its survival conditions, especially in the context of what our band was dealing with while travelling in its natural habitat.”
That movement from image to meaning feels important because Ghost Funk Orchestra have rarely made music that announces what it is supposed to mean before allowing you inside. Their records operate through atmosphere, texture and accumulation, and “Ocotillo” retains that quality even though its origins are unusually personal.
Julia Zivic sings directly toward the landscape, making the desert feel less like scenery than another participant in the song. Her presence is also tied directly to the tour that inspired it.
“There’s a lot of factors that dictate how I want to cast the vocals on a given tune,” Seth says. “It could be the singer’s overall tone, whether their range lands in a comfortable zone for the key I wrote in, and the overall character of their vocal presence. This is the first GFO tune that I’ve had Julia record on, which is fitting because she was with us on the tour that inspired the track.”
The idea of “casting” a singer says quite a lot about how Seth constructs Ghost Funk Orchestra records. The project began as a solitary recording exercise before becoming the much larger live organism it is today, and that growth has required accepting that the record and the stage cannot always be versions of exactly the same thing.
For economic reasons, the touring band is more commonly eight musicians than ten, and there was initially an awkwardness in having studio recordings containing more instrumentation than could realistically be reproduced each night.
“There was an awkward period before I accepted the fact that the live arrangements are always going to differ from the studio recordings,” Seth says. “Now that I’m leaning into that disparity, I feel more free to do whatever I want in the studio and then whittle it down to the most important elements for playing live.”
Sometimes that means reassigning parts because the original instrument is not even onstage. The objective becomes less about faithful reproduction than figuring out what a song absolutely requires in order to remain itself.
You can hear the result on Live in Europe. Ghost Funk Orchestra’s records are meticulously assembled, but the live band introduces a different physical character to them. “Fuzzy Logic,” in particular, became something significantly more aggressive once people started playing it together in rooms.
“I think ‘Fuzzy Logic’ is the tune that really showcases how much higher energy our live show is from the studio,” Seth says. “That’s not to say the studio version is low energy, but at a show we can really blow the doors off a place with that song.”
That tension between arrangement and abandon is perhaps already hidden inside the band’s name. “Orchestra” suggests discipline and collective purpose. “Ghost funk” suggests something stranger, rougher and harder to pin down.
“I have a very strong desire to present material that sounds thoughtful and well crafted while also letting it breathe enough to not sound clinical or overly academic,” Seth says. “I view the ‘orchestra’ side as just representing the diversity of sounds that I like to color my tracks with. The ‘ghost funk’ side is definitely the rougher edge, the freak flag that we fly when we play with excitement and attitude.”
That diversity has always been one of Ghost Funk Orchestra’s most recognizable qualities. A song can contain fragments of 1970s jazz-funk, psychedelic rock, Latin rhythms and cinematic orchestration without stopping to separate them into clearly labeled influences.
“At the heart of the project is a love for ’70s jazz-funk, and I’ll bend and shape that foundation to incorporate new influences as they come in,” Seth says. “I try to curate a really diverse record collection and feed my head for both enjoyment and occasional inspiration.”
Not everything survives that process. There have been directions that seemed interesting enough to pursue only to reveal themselves later as places Ghost Funk Orchestra did not particularly need to go.
“I’ve definitely tried my hand at certain vibes that ultimately didn’t feel quite right, but it’s usually in hindsight that I realize I temporarily lost the plot or veered into a lane I don’t need to exist in. Everything is trial and error.”
That willingness to keep absorbing music is also what prevents the project from becoming a nostalgia exercise. The sounds of older records are clearly embedded in Ghost Funk Orchestra, but Seth has little interest in treating the past as somewhere music should remain.
“It’s important to not wall yourself off from current music just because you prefer how bands did it back in the day,” he says. “There’s a reason why we’ve had opportunities to play with so many bands outside of our immediate genre.”
The band’s previous album, A Trip to the Moon, pushed in another direction entirely. It was conceived as a cinematic journey, deliberately more fantasy than autobiography, and in retrospect Seth sees that distance from himself as necessary.
“I had a blast putting A Trip To The Moon together, but it’s not a personal album beyond the many hours of work I put into making it,” he says. “It’s fantasy and ear candy, which I think was a necessary side quest on the road back towards more personal material.”
Part of that was simply reaching a point where he did not have anything personal he particularly wanted to excavate.
“I had already dumped a lot of emotional baggage into all our previous albums, so it felt natural to want to make one that was just for fun.”
“Ocotillo,” then, feels significant because it reconnects the project with something lived. The landscape was real. The tour was real. The exhaustion was real. Years later, those things have become distant enough to be transformed.
And that may be where Ghost Funk Orchestra heads next. After five albums and a live record, there is no suggestion that Seth has finally discovered a definitive version of the project. If anything, he seems more interested in the things he still does not know how to do.
“As long as I’m listening to music and discovering records I’ve never heard before, I’m always going to be influenced to try something new,” he says. “GFO has always been an avenue for me to sort out what makes my music taste tick.”
That could eventually mean more collaborative work, producing somebody else’s songs or working alongside another band. More surprisingly for a project so associated with densely layered recordings, it might mean deliberately taking things away.
“I could see exploring more minimal arrangements as a challenge to trim the fat,” Seth says. “I’m always trying to find better ways to transcribe the sounds in my head to physical sound.”
Which brings things neatly back to the ocotillo. Ghost Funk Orchestra has spent much of its existence adding things — musicians, textures, influences, arrangements — but survival is not always about accumulation. Sometimes it is about knowing what you can lose and still remain alive.
For Seth Applebaum, still figuring out how to turn the sounds in his head into something the rest of us can hear, there are probably worse lessons to take from a plant in the desert.
