murmur it starts
mimic it goes on
day doesn’t end
nor does the sun
then night
we curse the lonely hearts
break malaise apart
throw prudence to the dark
to stumble was enough
at night
we howl at beastly moon
drink our sense of doom
we steal from prize afar
what fell was just enough
on wedding day
what’s your dress i couldn’t say
know you will go
i feel up then really low
felt / satin sheets
lasting love / silk neath your robe
life has a change
for you now
and here i stand
slow you go
In 2005, we were clearing out of a practice space we had been renting in Greenpoint. At the time, the band was just me and Andy. We hadn’t released anything since 1996 and the idea of being a real band again was a very fragile one. We had a 4 track machine at the space and had filled many cassettes with recordings of our extremely tentative practices. I was packing all of the tapes up one day when I decided to listen to a few. I noticed an unmarked cassette (this seemed mysterious) and started with that one. To my surprise, the tape was filled with vocal demos Andy had recorded for some new ideas we were working on. It was just Andy, a nylon string guitar, and lots of reverb. I loved the songs right away. It sounded like Anilore meets Guided by Voices. Lo fi Anilore.
As we always do, we tried to redo the songs, produce them, overdub them, make them longer, etc., but we just kept coming back to the demos. One of the songs, Enisler, wound up being included on Dead Love’s Grave. We almost included the other songs as well, but we thought it made much more sense to write an entire new album from scratch rather than release the songs we already had.
The title track is an idea that actually dates back to the Still Awake period. Andy had this idea for a while. Back in New Paltz, he would often play the lull guitar part on an acoustic guitar after long nights of drinking. I immediately thought of it when we were putting this record together. It really fit with the other songs we had chosen and it was an automatic “last song.” We recorded lull during the DLG sessions but made sure it worked alongside the rest of the 4 track recordings. We also found a couple of other songs from the 2005 period: doorbells was a piano instrumental recorded at Context Studios in 2003, mimicry & murmur was an instrumental jam from the Greenpoint space. You get to hear Andy play drums for the first time on an Anilore song. The vocals were added later during the DLG sessions. We were really rusty back in those days, but we had a lot of fun at that space. We’re happy some recordings from that period are actually decent enough to share.
We really hope you like this record. It’s lonely, atmospheric, winter music. I don’t think we’re used to things coming together this easily, so we had to wait 12 years to put it out, so it at least felt like a really difficult, drawn out experience. In addition to the digital release, we’ve also pressed 200 10” records on blue marble vinyl. The cover art is once again provided by the amazing Anastasia Ugorskaya.
-Malenda
credits
released February 21, 2017
All songs by Andy Cheng & Andrew Malenda.
Cover art: STARROSPHERE #3 by Anastasia Ugoroskya
www.anastasiaugorskaya.com
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