We are so thrilled about our recent glowing review from Gareth Thompson at All About Jazz of our album Hymn! Gareth is a novelist and music critic based in the UK and he first found our music through our mutual love of King Crimson.
“Renowned for their combustible live performances, this band is way more than a troupe of melodic noiseniks. Indeed the compositional breadth and ambition on Hymn can fair take one’s breath at times. The numbers twist and spout with constant surprise elements, never leaving us in a state of stasis. If this changeful element comes from their close study of King Crimson, then all well and good. But a fluctuating aspect within any opus is welcome, to challenge creator and listener alike.”
We are grateful to Gareth for the kind words and to the wonderful guest musicians and friends who joined us for this album, Domenica Romagni on cello, Rachel Aubuchon on piano, Pascal Le Boeuf on piano. It was engineered, mixed and co-produced by Mat Leffler-Schulman at Mobtown Studios, with addition recording engineering by Zach Herchen, and mastered by Bill Hafener at Silo Recordings. And many thanks to Tommy Hambleton of Procrastination Records for releasing it!
“Thunderdome” and its music video, directed by Damien Davis, was debuted on today’s episode of NPR’s All Songs Considered, November 17th, 2020! Check it out here!
We could not be more thrilled to share this music and video with you, and we are releasing the Thunderdome EP digitally on Bandcamp today as well. It was released as a special edition vinyl-only extended single earlier this year, with the plan that we’d be able to sell them at shows, but, as you all know, things changed. The vinyl is also available to buy online, and the album art, by Gerald Ross, is stunning.
This EP is part of a full length album that is currently in progress, States of America, our collaboration with poet Dan Gutstein.
The other track from the EP, “Uh Huh,” has a video by Mark Isaac and Gabriela Bulisova, released earlier this year, which has been a finalist in the Prisma Rome, London Rocks, and LA Rocks Film Festivals.
We hope you tune in to NPR’s All Songs Considered, it is such an honor to be a part of their show again. Many thanks to All Songs Considered creator Bob Boilen!
We are excited to release a music video for “Hymn part 1”, the first track off of our latest album, Hymn, released by Procrastination Records in June 2020!
It was featured by Bob Boilen on All Songs Considered in Janurary 2019, when we first released it as a single with “Punk Jazz” (which also has a video, by Cody Nenninger of Momentum Productions in Baltimore).
A few years ago, I took the photo that was used as the album cover for Hymn, a close up of some beach grass in Southern Maryland, where my parents live. When John and I were deciding what to use for the cover, we were looking through photos I’ve taken and we landed on that one. We edited it and designed the cover together, and really liked the result of the darkened, highly contrasted grass that looks illuminated.
Since last year, we’ve been working with a fantastic video artist team, Gabriela Bulisova and Mark Isaac. They created a stunning video for our song “Uh Huh,” one of our quartet songs with poet/vocalist Dan Gutstein, and they are currently working on a video for “Selfies,” another song from this material. Seeing their work and how well it connected to and added to the music inspired me.
I was thinking of ways to ease into
digital animation, and thought about trying to work with just the cover photo. I
changed the position and size and used different visual effects to create a
choppy looking, morphing animation, and knew this is how the video would start.
If you’ve ever glanced at my Instagram, you know that I cannot stop taking pictures of plants (and our cat, Funz). There is a historic cemetery near where we live in Trenton, and I’ve walked there almost every day since mid-March. And during that time, I’ve taken many, many pictures of plants. So, thinking about the vibe of “Hymn,” and how joyous it is (probably our most “hippy” song, lol) I started taking short videos of grass blowing in the wind, on a few beautiful days in August. I was also able to visit my folks in MD and captured some video of the OG beach grass.
I put all the videos together with the song, but knew it was missing something. I showed it to John and he recommended a few things, the main ones being adding live footage of the band, and using the birds from the first drum fill again—during the drum solo towards the end. I found some footage that we forgot about, from a show (what’s that??) 2 years ago at Sunnyvale in Brooklyn, shot by Stephen Herchen, Zach Herchen’s father. Zach is our guest saxophonist who also did some audio engineering for part of the Hymn album.
Many thanks to John for helping finish up the video, and thanks to Stephen Herchen for letting us use the video of the band. And thank you to Tommy Hambleton again for releasing Hymn. We hope you enjoy this, and please subscribe to our Youtube channel and check out the other videos there. We have some more coming soon that we are really excited about!
We’re excited to announce that Uh Huh is an Official Selection for another film festival, the Los Angeles Rocks Film Festival. They will be including our music video in their sister festival, LONDON ROCKS, which will take place 24-31 October 2020, with online events and a physical screening.
You can watch the video below, as well as the trailer for it!
