× [We're A Happy Family] Darlingside "Live Stream Live" on February 11th

[We're A Happy Family] Darlingside "Live Stream Live" on February 11th

25-01-2021

Live Stream Live’ will take place on February 11th:
Darlingside is playing their new album, Fish Pond Fish, in its entirety and in sequence (they've never tried this before), plus a bunch of ye olden favorites. Deni Hlavinka (keys) and Ben Burns (drums) will be joining the band for the first time to bring out the flavors of the new album and help them reimagine some of the "classics". There will be two shows so both in Europe and the US there's a timeslot to watch it live, followed by a group meet & greet after all the music’s wrapped. All the events will be viewable for 72 hours following the live broadcast.  

Live Stream Live with Darlingside
Thursday, February 11th
2 Show Times:
- 21:00 (Amsterdam) 15:00 (New York)
- 02:00 (Amsterdam) 20:00 (New York)
All Access Post Show Q&A: 03:30 (Amsterdam) 21:30 (New York)
Live Stream Live tickets can be bought here:

Single Ticket: $15
Join us live on Feb 11th for the afternoon or the evening show!
Group Ticket: $25
Perhaps you’re tuning in with the whole family...or a socially distant group around a campfire? Or maybe you just want to throw the band some extra love. Please note: this ticket is intended for viewing within one household and only one ticket will be generated.
All Access Ticket: $50
Tune in for either the afternoon or the evening show plus the hour-long meet & greet with the band after the evening show! Bask and decompress and make merry with us just like in a real green room. Steer the conversation/antics wheresoever you see fit. You’ll also receive in the mail the mini-event-poster that Dave drew up for the stream, signed by the whole band!

Please note: a small fee is added at checkout for the hosts at Mandolin.

If Darlingside’s first album, Birds Say (2015), focused on the past through nostalgia and memory, and their second, Extralife (2018), contemplated uncertain futures, this album stands firmly in the present, taking stock of what’s here and now.  Fish Pond Fish (2020) is one of geology, meteorology, ornithology, astronomy and botany.  Band members Dave Senft (vocals, bass), Don Mitchell (vocals, guitar, banjo), Auyon Mukharji (vocals, violin, mandolin), and Harris Paseltiner (vocals, cello, guitar) have created a natural history in song. An album that catalogues the weird nooks of our world with the same curiosity of a botanist’s time-worn field journal. We’re led through old growth forests, down to the deep sea’s ‘true blue bottom where the light ends,’ and up to a few singled-out stars that shine ‘ochre’ overhead.

The band, which saw their ten-year anniversary in May of 2020, has long been praised for their harmonies and intelligent songwriting, described by NPR as “exquisitely-arranged, literary-minded, baroque folk-pop,” and which The New Yorker compared to David Crosby and the Byrds.  Their dynamic presence (crowded tightly together onstage for the audience to witness four voices turn to a singular texture of sound), paired with their sharp wit and wordplay, have made them a live-performance favorite, and their songs treasures for literary and lyric-loving fans. 

The band started studio recording Fish Pond Fish in late 2019, when they moved into Tarquin Studios—the Bridgeport, Connecticut residential studio of Grammy Award-winning producer Peter Katis (Interpol, The National). Those days included late-night and early morning recording sessions, family-style meals, and up to four separate recording rigs running in tandem. Living and working together in a residential studio brought the band to their very early years living and writing together under one roof in Hadley, Massachusetts, which seeded the origins of their intimate collaboration. 

The bedrock of the album reflects that collaboration, pervading almost every aspect of its making—from the multi-layered sound to the early stages of songwriting. “Song ideas emerged mostly from group exercises,” Dave Senft said of making Fish Pond Fish, “without much premeditation or discussion until after the kernel of the song already existed. This yielded more lyrically-driven ideas, or at least more lyrically-developed ideas earlier on in our process.” That ‘kernel of song’ sprouted and eventually flowered into something far beyond what any one band member could foresee. Everyone was pushed to a new place in every level of songwriting. “There’s truth beyond the bounds of your horizons,” Auyon Mukharji says of collaborating with three other people. “It’s like you’re searching through three-fourths of foreign consciousness. Bringing you to a place you couldn’t imagine. You move beyond yourself.”  

At Katis’s suggestion, many components of the initial demos were preserved as layers in the produced tracks to retain the spirit of the initial recordings, resulting in a collection of songs that is simultaneously the most bedroom-tracked and production-heavy full-length album that the band has yet released.  (In Ocean Bed, a dog can be heard barking, along with an iPhone recording of a faulty washing machine.)

Like the powers of nature winnowing out the fittest, shaping the crowns of flowers or horns of a deer or arc of a goldfish’s fin, the most profound biological event of our generation also shaped this album. The 2020 pandemic came just as the band was finalizing lyrics for the last batch of songs, which forced them to cancel the final weeks of recording at Tarquin Studios. Since they were unable to meet up in person during the quarantine, each member set up a home recording rig to capture sounds individually, while mixing, writing, and arrangement decisions were all carried out virtually. The band’s favored approaches for sound capture (playing and/or singing together around one mic, for example) and in-studio discussion were made impossible by the quarantine, so they evolved. They were forced to lean more heavily on individual experimentation and decision-making, both in recording and editing. As a result, the album bears an imprint of each of the four members in a way their previous releases have not. It’s sonically dense yet individually marked, impossible to categorize by one texture. 

Releasing an album during a pandemic is hard, but here is their offering: a celebration of life, in all its impulses and foliage and circling birds. “I picked the fruit,” they sing in See You Change, “It was right / In my hand / And it came to life.” They’ve given us a look at the weird and bursting offerings our planet has drummed up over the past three billion years—from tides to starlings to gravity. Here, they sing, take this fruit, and watch it come to life. 

 

 

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