Brightest Young Things

And Now For Something Completely Different: Last week, Baltimore's Human Bell (Dave Heumann from Arbouretum + Nathan Bell from Lungfish) released their debut self-titled album through ThrillJockey (home also to Fiery Furnaces, School of Language and Nemeth) and are arriving to Crooked Beat this Thursday to play it out for you.
The record itself is a both an intoxicating and somewhat of a mindfuck (and I always mean that as a compliment, you know) instrumental journey through Dave and Nathan's (seeminlgy) rather rich inner lives.
There are no words, no lyrics to sing along to, but instead you get sliding guitars, bowed banjos, amplified kalimbas, vibraphones, drum and a quartz singing bowl all gently layered through their dream sequences of songs.

IF THERE WAS EVER AN ALBUM THAT COULD BENEFIT FROM A BYT LISTENING PARTY, THIS IS IT.
As Dave himself tells it:

Ephaphatha (be opened):
This song was recorded at Nathan's house by our friend Antony West in 2006. At that point, we'd never expanded Human Bell to include other musicians and we recorded just my guitar and Nathan's trumpet.

During the sessions at Rove Studio in Kentucky,we thought we'd try a more fleshed-out version with Peter Townsend playing drums and Paul Oldham playing bass. It had this awesome, huge rock vibe that we were really excited about at the time. When it came time to edit the record, though, we used the original because we thought it would be more interesting if that rock "hugeness" was
implied, rather than clearly spelled out.

Outposts of Oblivion:
I really enjoy Matt Riley's contributions to this song. During the first part of the song, what sounds like howling canyon winds is Matt playing a banjo with a bow, which was later run through an echoplex at Soma Studios. During the second half of the song a sine-type tone can be heard: This is a quartz bowl of Matt's which is played with a cylinder in a circular fashion along the rim of the bowl. We duplicated and reversed the track, then panned the two tracks hard right and left.

Hymn Amerika:
A good one for a pow-wow. If you're not at one, you can have some friends over and pass a pipe around while you put this song on.

A Change in Fortunes:
When we showed up in Chicago to mix this, we discovered an enormous amount of snare buzz on the track. So much, in fact, that we didn't think we could use the song at all. Turns out the mic had fallen onto Pete's snare and no one noticed because we were all so caught up in what we were doing.
The night before that first day of mixing at Soma, I'd seen Euphone play at the Empty Bottle and was totally blown away by Ryan Rapsy's drumming. So I called our friend Emmett who'd filled in with Euphone that night and got Ryan's
number. It turned out he lived upstairs from Soma and was free that day, so he came by and overdubbed the drum track. He got it on I think the second or third take; no easy feat for that kind of thing.

The Album cover: On our first EP, there is a picture of General Sam Bell, who was a confederate general in the Civil War and ancestor of Nathan's. On the new record, the kid beneath the mask is a friend of a friend's son whose name is also Sam.
When we mixed the record in Chicago, we stayed with someone named Sam, and the guy who took our photos for a recent piece in the Baltimore City Paper is named Sam as well. The guy who tour managed us during our west coast tour in the fall of '06?
His name is Paul.

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check out the in-store tomorrow at Crooked Beat.