at the halfway point

Hello, everyone.
Thanks for stopping by to check out yet another release.

We are now halfway through our yearlong project of releasing 2 tracks every month with original photography and video. This seems as good a time as any to pause for reflection.

So far this year, we have produced almost exactly 55 minutes of music, more than 30 minutes of which also includes video, along with photos for each release. Compare this with our debut album, "lullabies", which was approximately 45 minutes long and took somewhere around 3 years to finish (and had no video until we started playing live shows). Amazing what deadlines can do!

One of the really fun parts of the year has been the creation of the mid-month teasers/interludes/what-have-yous, as we've sought different ways to connect those tracks to the larger end-of-month songs. We usually also had less time to create these shorter tunes (in most cases, just 1-2 days), which has resulted in more experimentation and playfulness, simply so that we could finish on time.

Coincidentally, right as we were starting our yearlong project, Ryan Lott (Son Lux) announced that he would be participating in an album-in-a-month project for February (check out http://fawm.org/). This concluded with the release of his album "We Are Rising". It's not a perfect album (though we like it a lot!), but it's a fascinating example of how a shortened time frame, which sometimes required extreme collaboration to record, resulted in an album with non-standard song structures and unique studio-crafted sounds. In some ways, we've seen those parallels in our own work. Creating so much within such a short period of time has forced us to react instinctively, about sounds, orchestration, form, shape, etc., which has helped our music grow and change rapidly. It's been invigorating, challenging, fun and frustrating.

In closing, I'll just mention that we're currently looking at ways to push things even further for the rest of the year, starting, hopefully, with July's track (keep in mind that we often start each month with no idea as to what we're going to put out at the end of the month!). In particular, we plan to seek out more collaborations with other performers. We had a great time working with the Weather Duo on our May track, "let the waves carry us (part 1)", and we would like to explore this kind of thing more extensively in the second half of the year.
Thanks for listening.
-Eric and Jeff

P.S. In light of what will likely become a heavier emphasis on collaboration, detailed track credits and anecdotes will be coming to the site soon.