Tacoma Park | Album Premiere
Exclusive album premiere of Chapel Hill, NC guitar/synth duo Tacoma Park’s forthcoming self-titled.
John Harrison (Jphono1, North Elementary, the Comas) and Benjamin David Felton (BloodRevenge, Shark Quest, Jett Rink) planted the seeds of Tacoma Park the night after the 2016 election. Maybe you felt like they did that night, over-worried and under-slept, sensing that if there was going to be hope, you’d have to make it yourself. After seeing a solo performance under John’s, Ben suggested they playa show together. Back then, Ben was playing as BloodRevenge, an improv-based solo guitar project and through the stylistic differences, he saw a thread in their mutual implementation of loop pedals, implying a shared interest in the relationship between playing, listening, and space. They booked the November 9th show at theCave in Chapel Hill, knowing that one way or another, they would be bringing very strong feelings with them that night.
The decision to play together seemed obvious. John was interested in exploring his improvisational side more, and Ben was interested in playing with someone other than himself. Long story short, they got together with guitars, played an inaugural show under their own names, brought some synthesizers to practice, and became Tacoma Park.
There’s no way around it: ‘Tacoma Park,’ the band’s second album, is a pandemic record. Not in the what do we do now sense, but in the, how can imposed constraints open our creative sensibilities and practices (both individually and collectively) to create something new, sense, a recognition of possibilities. It began simply enough. With a small tour canceled, and band practice completely off the table, they started passing tracks back and forth. They combined elements of their previously established practice as a band, improvising around compositional templates, and incorporated new ones, an inevitable outcome of the predicament. The basic process was whoever got the ball rolling (i.e. sent the first tracks) handled the final mix. The result was a series of singles released digitally and independently. The pieces were different from their previous work, sculpted more within their respective DAWs, the limitations of two people in a room largely out the door, time and space their two greatest resources for utilizing improvisation as a portal to composition. After several months of honing this new approach, they decided this was how the next record would be recorded.
‘Tacoma Park’ is a document of a point in time. Perhaps all records are (probably why they’re called “records”) but it still feels worth noting. It’s a reflection on the gift and the curse of time, what happens when there’s nowhere to be but here, when you want to go and want to stay. It’s an experiment in new forms of communication, the narrative of an upsettingly unfamiliar point in time, an interpretation of a collective anxiety, an exercise in gratitude for all that was not lost and still isn’t. It’s an attempt to tell a story without words because sometimes, there just aren’t any.
‘Tacoma Park’ was written, performed, recorded, and mixed by John Harrison and Benjamin David Felton, with help from Justin Blatt, John Crouch, Nathan Golub, and Judy Woodall. It was mastered by Nicholas T. Peterson.
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