Spiritual 029 :: The Tyde :: Season 5

Spiritual Pajamas is thrilled to announce the new album "Season 5" from The Tyde

Pre order your copy of the limited edition vinyl or digital download at:

https://thetyde.bandcamp.com/album/season-5

The Tyde Embraces Floridian ‘SUAVE NOUVEAU’ In “Season 5”

"You just got to learn to go with the heat, Rico. It's just like life. You just gotta keep telling yourself, no matter how hot it gets, sooner or later there's a cool breeze coming in.” — Sonny Crocket, Miami Vice

In “Season 5,” the long-awaited fifth full-length by beach-pop project The Tyde, frontman Darren Rademaker unveils his vision of an ‘80s-inspired Suave Nouveau, with a clutch of sweet, melancholic love songs evoking lush mustaches, mellow macho, the ghost of Jimmy Buffett, white sand beaches, flamingos swooping across a cerulean sky, speedboats cutting through the bay and pastel linen suits billowing in the breeze as the sun dips beneath the horizon.

Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce de León “discovered” Florida in 1513, naming the peninsula La Florida, the flowering land. In “Season 5," Rademaker reflects on his own return to the flowering land, and the artistic diaspora that caused him to quit California in 2020 in search of a New World of his own. “I lived in Florida from the ages of 10 to 25, but never really got to explore it,” he says. “When I came back, I decided to really embrace the whole Florida aesthetic. I moved into an art deco home in Sarasota with pink seashell lamps. I visited Key West, like seven times. I also quit smoking weed and cigarettes, and stopped saying shit like “LOL" and “amazeballs.” It felt different. It felt good.”

He started developing the tracks on “Season Five” during lockdown—just him, a Casio keyboard and re-runs of Miami Vice and Magnum P.I. “In the past, I have always looked to California for inspiration, with surfing and the Neil Young coastal vibe. But I knew I wanted these songs to be less California, and more about the islands.” The result is a sonic diary, high on the fumes of memory, filled with longing for things that are vanishing amid a quietly collapsing America, juxtaposing the allure of peachy sunsets with a sense of negative space, a psychic and temporal dislocation, the feeling that a golden age has slipped away, and the vagabond years are over.

The record features the talents of many good friends, including Dan Horne, Colby Buddelmeyer, Matt Correia (Allah-Las), Clay Finch (Mapache), Albert Hickman, Derek James (The Entrance Band), Alex Knost (Tomorrow’s Tulips) and Adam MacDougall (Circles Around the Sun/Black Crowes), with artist/ musician Matt Fishbeck (Holy Shit) designing the deco-inspired album artwork.

Tracks like “Heal Thyself” compel you to close your eyes, disconnect from social media, and imagine yourselves somewhere far, far away from the city, somewhere that’s gentle on the soul. “Tropical Madness” is sweet as a Piña Colada on the beach at sunset, while the instrumental “Legend of the Lost Art” transports you directly to a baggy Madchester sunrise during the UK’s Second Summer of Love, circa 1989. 

And as much as they are inspired by the past, these songs are keenly aware of an uncertain future—because there is no such thing as a time machine, and there is no going back. Ultimately, “Season 5” asks the question—where do we go after the sun sets on our dreams? Where the fuck is the New New World? In Rademaker's eyes, it no longer exists in any specific American geography—rather, all hope remains in the timeless, unending power of music, and its power to take us to the places we wish we could be. Even if they don’t exist anymore.

Words by Caroline Ryder

Release Date 3/8/2024

Spiritual 030 :: Dan Horne :: Count The Clouds

Spiritual Pajamas is honored to announce the vinyl release of “Count The Clouds” the debut album from Dan Horne.

Order your copy of the limited edition vinyl at:

https://danhorne.bandcamp.com/album/count-the-clouds

Record producer and electric bassist Dan Horne returns to his Lone Palm a.k.a. Liberty Hair Farm studio in Echo Park, Los Angeles for the vinyl release of his debut full-length studio album, Count The Clouds.  Recorded in 2020 - 2021 before his touring schedule kicked back into high gear with Circles Around the Sun and Grateful Shred, Horne unveils Count The Clouds featuring eight songs with the multi-instrumentalist vibin’ out on all the guitars, drums, pedal steel, and keys. A flashback to mid-1960s psychedelic folk, Count The Clouds includes special guests Ny Oh from Harry Styles’ band, Raze Regal, and Frank LoCrasto.

Count The Clouds opens with “Leave The Light On,” a floaty hook-laden song with a hopeful theme of leaving the light on even when your dreams are broken and you feel left behind. “Dontcha Know” was stuck in Horne’s head for years before he finally laid it down in the studio. “I love how this single is at the top of the album,” says Horne. “I don’t think people who know my music will expect this kinda sound from me. At the core, the track is about moving on from relationships and not being bitter about it.”

 “Hedgehog’s Song” is a whimsical Horne cover of the hit British folk act Incredible String Band from their lauded album, The 5000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion. He enlists keyboardist Frank LoCrasto for “Hedgehog’s Song,” a player known for collaborations with Fruit Bats, Greg Osby, and Pat Martino. The track eases into a companion dreamscape piece with epic solos and Horne’s thick bass lines driving an epic jam on “Hedgehog’s Dream.”

“Bicycle Rider” was written while riding his bike down by the LA river and through Elysian Park enroute to his studio. His daily bike rides have become “clear my head” rituals. Guitarist Raze Regal guests on the song. At the heart of “Pieces,” Horne brings the ethos of “peace” back into people’s consciousness with a synth-laden track featuring guest vocalist Ny Oh (Harry Styles). With all the modern talk about politics and the world’s problems, Horne reflects on the biggest thing missing, “dialogue about peace and how central that was in the 1960s.”

Originally written to be played by another band as the Dan Horne Band walks on stage and exits after their set, "Hair Farm Blues” is now a staple encore for their live shows. “Ode to the Road” is a trip down memory lane from all the tours Horne’s been on. The stories are all true as he reminisces about everyone he’s met and hung out with along the way.

Horne is gaining recognition on the Echo Park scene as a producer at Lone Palm a.k.a. Liberty Hair Farm working with artists Mapache, Chapin Sisters, Pacific Range, Allah-Las, and others. On the national live music circuit, he’s a founding member of Circles Around the Sun, the Dead tribute band Grateful Shred (who’s selling out venues all across the country), and a key player with bandleaders Jonathan Wilson, Ben Kweller and Conor Oberst.

Spiritual 025 :: Lauren Barth :: Stormwating

 Spiritual Pajamas is beyond excited to announce the upcoming release of “Stormwaiting” the amazing new album from Lauren Barth

Order your copy of the limited edition vinyl or digital at:

https://laurenbarth.bandcamp.com/album/stormwaiting

Driving up the coast highway from LA, once you hit Santa Barbara you are struck with a noticeable change in landscape. It is the gateway to the Central coast, where the contours of the land begin to take on more dramatic inclines and feelings burn like wildfires. This was the childhood home of Lauren Barth, ranch living and horse riding amongst the golden and dusty open ranges that still expand through parts of California. It is at these gates of change that Lauren Barth explores on Stormwaiting, her second solo effort and first on the Spiritual Pajamas label.

Behind the musical landscape of Stormwaiting, Lauren drew from a backstory she created as inspiration. A young woman and spiritual leader of a commune, blind yet finds her way by a heightened sense of awareness, is caught between the physical world of “Rialto” and the spiritual—“Morian”. “Stormwaiting” is slang for living in Rialto and the storm is the tempest within Morian. The cult’s most important message is one of Awareness. Like her protagonist, Lauren steps through these contemplations of change coming, treading one step at a time between the physical and spiritual realms, in a bittersweet anticipation of something upon us. Each song is like a deep breath in, an exhale, a pondering of the past and a wonder about the future with an acute awareness of each passing moment.

On the title track, Lauren explores the question of who she is and where she is in juxtaposition to another, and it is these questions she answers throughout: “Leave me alone, you are the tower, I am the storm”. But follows with “I am the mountain, green grass all around... I will take you home”. Parts of her past she willingly lets go and other parts she can’t. In Leave Behind “little girl lazy coming up the road to see me, I was once a traveler too. All these old memories taken by the sea, still don’t know what path to choose. Wake me up from this dream I can’t leave behind.” On Durango, she is resigned to her own state of floating through storm:

I’m drawing shadows on walls
My baby’s still gone
And it’s much too late to go home
Guess I’ll drive to Durango
Spent so many hours awake with you 
Now I’ll never sleep, now I’ll never sleep again

The more serious moments are contrasted by some fun in the Family Chant series, a palpable impromptu romp of friends harmonizing along with Sam Blasucci from Mapache reading spoken word of an old Dark Star magazine.

Barth is a true seasoned folk music player, evoking the California folk movement of the late 1960s like David Crosby (who also hailed from the Santa Barbara area), while also calling upon British influences such as Bert Jansch, Incredible String Band, Fairport Convention, Nick Drake, and Pentangle, and the later American progressive folk music of Jeff Buckley, Joni Mitchell, and early Bonnie Raitt. In the time since her last solo record in 2017, she picked up the bass with Farmer Dave and the Wizards of the West, and with her own music gained experience with the process of composing, recording, arranging, and ultimately the confidence to allow her creative instincts to flourish. She found the perfect partner with producer Lewis Pesacov, recording in his Echo Park home studio and has worked with artists such as Pearl Charles, Best Coast, Fidlar, and also works in the world of classical and world music. Tellingly, Stormwaiting has an expansive spirit, a document of a woman and creative spirit finding and embracing her voice beyond folk music and into her own spiritual universe. 

-Scary Flowers

Release date 4/14/2023

Spiritual 026 :: Nico Georis :: A Rainbow In Curved Air

Spiritual Pajamas is honored to announce the release of Nico Georis A Rainbow In Curved Air

Order your copy of the limited edition vinyl and digital at:

https://nicogeoris.bandcamp.com/album/a-rainbow-in-curved-air-2

It was never supposed to happen. No one was supposed to reimagine Terry Riley’s A Rainbow In Curved Air - a piece of music that, until now, has existed in its own class of expression. No one was supposed to scale the perilous heights of the citadel and come back with another document of the strange festival scenes within. With the release of Nico Georis’ A Rainbow In Curved Air it’s clear now that this piece of music is a place that you can go to, a kind of astral sanctum that can be visited again and again so long as you know the mysterious paths that lead to it.

 

Doing away with the production tricks used on Riley’s original recording (just intonation, mirror image delay, half-speed tracking of all lead parts) Nico Georis confronts the central seven time theme with a new transparency that gradually complexifies into astonishing Persian carpet displays of patterned musical awareness. This is music of the plenum and not the void: it is teeming with forms that behave in ways that recall descriptions of elaborately jeweled DMT hyperspace; sonic shapes that are driven by the pure uplift and force of infinite, unconstrained autotransformation. In this way it is similar to the original but the pace is way less manic, way more listenable as it rides forward on a calm surge of dazzling zero point energy.

 

The three other songs on the record are Georis originals. Vapor is a moment of twilight abstraction, a plant music duet that features Nico playing along with the plaintive washes of sound produced by a cannabis plant connected to a biodata sonification device. This song was composed spontaneously as it was broadcast live over Nico’s Big Sur based pirate channel, Milky Way Radio. Side B contains two remarkable songs, Hot Slots and 777, that are built mostly out of samples of the slot machine sounds. They are both lush holograms of hallucinated beauty and convey something about the spirit of luck, abundance and possibility.

 

This is music for feast days that celebrate the creative selection and birth of new realities.  We are just beginning to remember how full music can be, how freighted with spirit forms and attention. We are just now becoming civilized enough for the ecstasy of this music. Now that our species has had enough time to experience this kind of fullness we are perched on the edge of this realization:

 

There has only ever been one song.

 

Occasionally, with adequate preparation and clarity of vision, a musician can usher their consciousness, shamanic, into communion with the living texture of this song. If they survive (it can be dangerous!) and if they have the presence of mind to push the record button at the beginning of their journey then they may return with something remarkable, an account of what they experienced in that other place. Music like a kind of phosphene twilight language autotransforming in the dark, songs written in rainbow black fire on white fire, an inaudible flapping of wings. This is one of those rare documents. Forbidden yet welcoming it spins before you with the uncanny familiarity of a stranger smiling at you in a crowd. Drop the needle and enter again into the spiral stream of giddy, tessellated sensations. It is waiting for you here. Now listen.

Matt Baldwin

Release date 7/29/2022

Spiritual 027 :: OSEES :: Live in Big Sur

Spiritual Pajamas is thrilled to announce the vinyl release of OSEES - Live at Henry Miller Library, Big Sur

Preorder your copy of the limited edition vinyl at:

https://ohsees.bandcamp.com/album/live-at-henry-miller-library-big-sur

"When we finally decided to bite the bullet during Covid’s initial shut down and subsequent clubs shuttering, we thought we should play some lovely and close to our heart spots to keep it interesting.

Henry Miller library fits that bill perfectly.  Lovely place, lovely people & general good vibes. A perfect place for us to set up and record.  Also, included here are the covers we did because why the fuck not."

"We’ve dipped deep into the dark waters of our song-sack of holding and found several more never-before-performed-live tunes & paired them up with some oldies we’ve knocked the dust off of, as well as some fan favorites and general surprises to make the merry very.  That’s right, we’ve been paying attention. Recorded from dusk till dawn 2 at the gorgeous Henry Miller Library in Big Sur. Same killer crew, similar killer vibes. An enchanting pre-holiday evening to tell you that we miss and love you. Play it loud and have one on us. And keep your chin up for goodness sake.

Be well out there

OSEES

Release date 6/3/2022