Beacon’s sound builds on artistic foundations

It seems appropriate that the two members of Beacon met while studying visual arts in college, since they liken producing songs to putting together art installations. Jacob Gossett and Thomas Mularney III are the songwriters behind the lush, moody electronica of Beacon, who stop by the Bartlett on Sunday.

“I was doing performance art in school, and I was always inching closer and closer to being a performer and making music,” Mularney said. “In hindsight, I always approached visual art musically … It was always something cerebral, something you could feel.”

“I don’t approach music in a way that’s traditionally musical,” Gossett said. “It’s more construction for me, putting things together in a piecemeal way. That’s always how I approached visual art as well. They are far apart in some ways, but the general mindset of how I approach creating something is pretty uniform across the board.”

The band started in 2010 while Gossett and Mularney were students at Pratt Institute, and they released their first EP the following year. A full length album (2013’s “The Ways We Separate”) and another EP later, Beacon is now embarking on its first headlining tour of the West Coast.

“We collaborated on other projects before music, and we just had a good rapport,” Gossett said. “Creatively, we were in a similar space on a lot of things.”

“It started with us just having a lot of fun with it,” Mularney said. “Finishing school and playing shows constantly … was a way to keep us busy every week, playing house shows or small shows in New York. I think that helped push us to constantly keep doing it, even when there weren’t a lot of people at our shows and we were still learning our instruments.”

The band’s latest release is a five-track EP called “L1,” and although the new songs maintain Beacon’s mournful and spacey tone, there’s certainly an increasing energy.

“With this last record, the biggest difference is songs creeping up in tempo,” Gossett said. “That could be a result of touring and playing music live even more, and seeing how certain crowds respond to the songs we’re making and wanting to follow those threads. … That was always in the back of our minds: What is going to translate best live?”

They’ve discussed adding a live drummer – “That would take the performance into another dimension, for sure,” Gossett said – but for now it’s just the two of them. Although their individual approaches to their work haven’t changed, their sources of influence continue to grow as they tour.

“I kind of lament the fact that I’m not listening to more music,” Mularney said. “In the process of writing this record, the only thing you have room for is what you’re working on. In the music I listen to, I’m most inspired by the sounds and the textures. That’s really inspiring, and I can take that inspiration and challenge myself.”

“But I like to think that the music is always kind of evolving,” Gossett said, “and we’re trying not to repeat ourselves and get too stuck in one zone. That’s important, I think.”