Pastels: A Mixtape

Released today is a collection of unearthed ideas, early song demos, and outtakes from the three full-length albums of our 12 year collaboration. Initially shared among nine friends on CD-Rs in hand-stamped sleeves, it’s now reimagined as etherial ones and zeros on the fantastic Youngbloods label.

Listen & download here.

June 2nd, 1994: Red-eyed with a pounding heart - through florescent-lit stairwells and hallways - I dragged Cray-Pas against my high school’s virgin walls, crumbling swirls and loops of an identity which got me arrested only months before; this time, no cap exploded and bled forest green paint all over my hand and down my wrist. Summer was tomorrow, and I had snuck away from art class where my friend and bandmate, Jason Hunt, was using the same Cray-Pas to create landscapes with caverns, woods, and fire-colored skies.

A longtime sonic kinship bloomed in our shared loft and makeshift studio above a Chinese restaurant nearly ten years later. Early versions of songs were built on loop pedals, repetitions left largely ambient as a canvas on which other instrumentation and words would emerge. These melancholy progressions were like colors playing through our common walls and echoing in my mind: the yellow of blurry Polaroids coming into focus; chalky figure drawings hidden in portfolios. They were soon exchanged on CD-Rs between what became my new home in Brooklyn and the one I’d left behind in Chicago. While some of these skeletons went on to be fully realized, others were forgotten, shielding their own unique story of a time.

Like the colorful and often sticky pages of our spiral sketchbooks, Pastels is a mixtape of these moments.

From the original photoshoot from “Fall”