The demo version of "Lady Daydream," from side B of our Alternates cassette, available at shows (sometimes) and through The Curatorial Club.

The sleek, nocturnal counterpoint to pt. 1:

Tour Log pt. 2

So Good - Electrik Red
Love Has Come Around - Donald Byrd and 125th St, NYC
Something About Us - Daft Punk
Take Me Take Me - Perfume
Neon Lights - Kraftwerk

Here's a little handful of songs that got a lot of play in our big blue van on tour last month. Part 2 to follow in a day or so...

Tour Log pt. 1

I Hear a New World - Joe Meek
Ongaku - Yellow Magic Orchestra
Darkroom - Paul McCartney
Journey in Satchidananda - Alice Coletrane
The Platform on the Ocean - Arthur Russell
All I Wanna Do - The Beach Boys

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My father, an emigrant who left India in 1991, collected all of these songs over the years, digitizing old tapes, ripping CD's from midwestern libraries, and spending long nights reclaiming bits and pieces of a past life via a 28.8 kbps modem connection. Some of them are really bad quality rips, but I guess that emphasizes the distance these songs have had to travel to make it here.

The songs themselves are mostly taken from the 70s, a heady time for Bollywood films and their music.  Growing up in a house where I only really heard this music through the conduit of late night tipsy singalongs, I've had minimal exposure to the recordings themselves.  Listening to them again now, what's clear is how amazingly weird some of the sounds are.  Moog synthesizers, surf rock guitars, big band inspired horns, and a distinctly Indian rhythm section and sense of melody make for some really interesting experiments.  The giant who stands over most of this is RD Burman, as he had a hand in writing, producing, and performing in almost every song on the mix.  So, if this music is new to you, and you like what you hear, he is the best place to start.  The tracklist is below:

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We played The New Afternoon Show at WNYU today. Thanks to Jenn Pelly for having us on.

As a band that's kind of scattered throughout Long Island and Brooklyn, we've made a lot of use of email to stay in touch and make decisions.  As a result, we've built up quite a sizable archive of exactly what we were thinking and talking about at a point in time.  In light of this, we're publishing a continuing series of snippets of our email conversations.

To kick things off, we have us naming both our band and EP.  A bit of context is probably necessary to understand the following exchange.  We were calling ourselves Dreaming Kids at one point, but decided we didn't really like the name.  Secondly, Andrea and Eric used to play together as Vampires. Hope you enjoy the emails below.

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If you've noticed, we're playing a lot of show in the next few months.  We're not used to dealing with this kind of volume, and managed to double book ourselves for April 9th and 10th.  As a result, the Alphabet Lounge show on April 9th and the show at the Tortilla Factory on April 10th have been cancelled.  Our bad!  However, all of you looking forward to delicious tacos should not worry too much, because we're going to be rescheduling the Tortilla Factory show with our friends in Weed Hounds and Big Soda.  I'll post the replacement shows in a bit.   

We are very pleased to announce that we'll be embarking on our first tour in March with the excellent Holiday Shores.  We're leaving New York on March 13th to play a show in Philly, driving to Austin for SXSW, making a stop in Mexico for MtyMx, and then winding our way back to New York via the wonderful dates below:

Here is the mix of Nectarine before we put it through Gabe's tape player.

This song we are thinking of bringing on tour with us, among a few others we've been working on. Andrea is playing drums! She wouldn't let me post this unless I mentioned she hasn't played drums in over a year. She used to be our drummer before Bryan moved back.

Just found a bunch of alternate mixes of songs on a CD in my Mom's car today. Will post another tomorrow.

I made the backing sounds this past summer, then Eric sang over it one night in December after making fruit baskets all day.

 We're almost done with a new EP! It'll be our first "official" release, meaning it'll be reproduced physically (vinyl!!) and come out on Infinite Best Recordings.  It's going to be called Color Your Life.

the tracklist:

The Other Side of Your Face

Lady Daydream

Milk & Honey

All Around and Away We Go

Galaxy Plateau

Phenomenons

Ribbon Bow is something I did a couple of years ago, and then promptly lost.  Thankfully Eric had a copy.