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Sleepwalking Through The Ages

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With their forthcoming album on Spacebomb Records, Richmond’s Sleepwalkers demonstrate their mastery over many eras of musical evolution.

Having established themselves as leaders of Richmond’s retro-inspired indie rock scene on their 2014 debut album, Greenwood Shade, the river city’s own Sleepwalkers are back with a new album that confirms their status as a band that shouldn’t be ignored. 

On Ages, set to be released on July 19 via Spacebomb Records, Sleepwalkers revive the best sounds of the 70s and 80s, keeping their music original with a tasteful modern flair added to the mix. A pop record at its core, Ages wouldn’t be complete without fuzzed-out melodies and lush instrumentation that allows for plenty of repeat listens without ever failing to capture the listener’s attention. 

Sleepwalkers’ retro sound is influenced by “all the greats,” according to Austin York, who plays bass and sings in the band. The band cited Prince, The Beatles, and Genesis as having played a part in inspiring the sound that came out on the record. 

“We take inspiration from people like Quincy Jones,” said Michael York, brother of Austin, who plays guitar and sings in the band. Jones is a legendary producer who has worked with Michael Jackson, Frank Sinatra, and Ella Fitzgerald. That the band draws inspiration from a producer is telling; Ages was produced by the band all by themselves, allowing for complete creative control.

“I think the thing we are most proud of is the fact that we are a self-contained production group,” said Alex DeJong, who drums and engineers sound for the band. “We tried to push ourselves using the studio as a tool more than we did with the first record.”

Michael and Austin York in the studio.

Whereas Sleepwalkers’ booked the release show for Greenwood Shade before the album was even complete, forcing them to finish by a certain date, the band decided to give Ages the proper studio treatment. “This one was more taking our time, figuring out what sort of tones we wanted, which vibe we wanted,” said Austin. 

Chock full of various melodies and rhythms that stack on top of each other, Ages is a maximalist record, one that allows space for the sounds of different time periods to shine through. 

“We are doing these different time periods of music and the production changes with each one. It’s kind of like moving through different time periods,” Austin said. “It’s the Ages concept — moving through time.” 

The band’s debut album, Greenwood Shade, was self-released, but for Ages, they’ve hooked up with Spacebomb, a Richmond-based record label co-founded by well-known local musician Matthew E. White. With Spacebomb’s track record of releasing music by not only White but Natalie Prass, Andy Jenkins, and Bedouine, some might feel that Sleepwalkers’ time-traveling sound has found the perfect home. But for Sleepwalkers, the Spacebomb connection is really about friendship.

“Matt White brought us on tour a few years ago, and we just became good buds,” DeJong said. “It’s kind of a neat thing having a label in town.” 

Sleepwalkers are embarking on a tour in support of Ages. They’ll kick things off on July 13 in Richmond, alongside local favorites Camp Howard at The Broadberry. 

“Live shows are different,” Austin said, explaining that it’s difficult to replicate the complex sounds of the studio live on stage. DeJong mentioned that the band will stack a variety of keyboard tones onto a single keyboard, allowing for one instrument to sound like multiple synths. 

“It’s kind of hard to replicate a lot of the stuff, but we do make up for it with theatricality, or heavier vocals,” Michael added. 

Forging a new, unique sound by blending the music of the past with modern pop sensibilities, Sleepwalkers are notable for their ability to pay homage to the musical greats of earlier decades while maintaining a sound that is distinctively their own. 

This is a big challenge for any band, but it seems to come naturally to Sleepwalkers. The band is correct to be proud of the feat: “We did it all ourselves,” Austin said. 

Photos via Sleepwalkers/Facebook

Music Sponsored By Graduate Richmond

Sweetly Begun: Veteran Spacebomb Artist Andy Jenkins on His Debut Album

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On the opening track of his debut full-length album, Sweet Bunch, Andy Jenkins sings, “Man, I would love to finish the book, but I still have pages and pages of lines.” Lucky for us, his story as a singer-songwriter is just beginning.

This article originally appeared in RVA #33 Summer 2018, you can check out the issue here, or pick it up around Richmond now. 

Sweet Bunch was released June 15 via Spacebomb Records, and while the collection represents a new start for Jenkins, pages and pages of his writing are already out there. His name will ring especially familiar for anyone who has been scanning the liner notes of Spacebomb’s releases since its 2010 founding. You’ll find “Andy C. Jenkins” listed among the writing credits for each of label founder Matthew E. White’s solo albums to date, including White’s breakout debut, Big Inner, which introduced the world to the signature Spacebomb sound. It also introduced the hypnotic combination of White’s soft-spoken vocals, which draw you in, and lyrics that incorporate just enough mystery to keep you at arm’s length. To borrow a line from the Sweet Bunch title track, it’s “a beautiful place to be.”

Despite the second meaning of the name of Big Inner — spoken quickly, it sounds like you’re saying “beginner” — its songs felt powerfully ahead of the curve, reflecting a long history of White and Jenkins working together as a musical team. In fact, their friendship dates all the way back to a play Jenkins performed in while attending high school in Norfolk, Virginia.

“The full story is, he came to see a play at my high school that I was in, and he was coming to my high school the next year,” Jenkins recounted when we spoke over the phone recently. “But his girlfriend at the time went to the high school, and he [said], ‘I’m going to be friends with that guy,’ just from my dramatic performance [laughs]. And then we were in class together and just became buddies, and started fucking around with music [and] four-track [recorders] after that.”

Jenkins graduated high school in 2002 and went on to attend the University of Virginia. And while college geographically separated him from White, who enrolled at Virginia Commonwealth University after a short time at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, the two friends never stopped collaborating. Jenkins eventually moved to Richmond, where he set up a home base for Great White Jenkins, the band the two would periodically play in together until 2011.

His next move was a little further afield. “I did the whole teaching English thing for a year,” Jenkins said. “After I lived in Richmond for a few years, and after the Great White Jenkins, I went over [to Japan] and did that. It was great. It was a really cool experience.”

Nearly 7,000 miles from home, Jenkins still managed to plug into a familiar niche. “I kind of fell in with some kind of underground art and music folk over there pretty rapidly. Some people I know here knew people there… I got to see some of the whole Boredoms scene. OOIOO played — I saw them in Osaka, which is Yoshimi [P-We]’s band, so there’s a little bit of that. And my friend Norio [Fukuda] runs the record label/small press in Tokyo called Sweet Dreams. He puts out some bands that do a cool thing — more experimentally minded, but very pretty folk music. It’s a line of genre-blurring that’s not as much of a thing here. But in that little scene, it’s more normal, and people liked a lot of different things.”
It seems timely in retrospect that Jenkins’ musical map expanded globally in this way, just as Spacebomb Records was set to bring a growing Richmond scene to ears all over the world. Now, with four Matthew E. White releases in the rearview mirror, breakthrough albums by Bedouine and Natalie Prass as impressive milestones, and a game-changing boost provided by the label’s new partnership with Glassnote Entertainment Group’s Resolved Records, Spacebomb has set the stage for Jenkins to move into an expanded role. “It’s a new thing to be the focal point, for sure,” Jenkins affirmed.

“It just made sense to do this,” Jenkins added. “I wanted to do [Sweet Bunch] because I like making it and listening to it. I wanted to hear it, I guess, so that’s a reason to make it.”

It’s a transition that’s helped him grow his craft. He mentioned that writing and recording Sweet Bunch involved “thinking about the audience more, in a way, and then coming back to writing what I wanted to write for myself,” he said. “I feel like that’s stronger anyway.”

It’s also given him an opportunity to make a statement about what it means to be a singer-songwriter in 2018, not unlike what Sturgill Simpson and William Tyler did in the country context by titling recent albums Metamodern Sounds in Country Music and Modern Country, respectively. “I toyed with the idea of calling the record Contemporary Singer-Songwriter for a minute,” Jenkins said. “Just because I feel like that term has a very negative stigma in certain circles. It’s definitely not a cool term. But it’s very accurate to what I’m doing, and that first generation of singer-songwriters, when the term came into fashion, that’s just a great body of music that I love.”

Throughout Sweet Bunch, I hear parallels with the approach taken by that generation’s finest writers, who dug deeper to find inspiration not just in the exceptional, but also in the everyday. In the same way Carole King brought out the essential goodness of friendship and built a colossal chorus out of the understated idea of feeling like a natural woman, Jenkins makes an anthemic title track hook out of appreciation for the people around him. With a fitting guest vocal assist from Matthew E. White, “Sweet Bunch” declares, “All the boys are true/They are true as the wind,” and “All the girls are strong/They are strong as the sea.”

There and elsewhere, the lyrics echo the way in which the record was made. The band Jenkins turned to when tracking Sweet Bunch was made up of close friends from the masterful Spacebomb house band, as well as multi-instrumental heavyweight Phil Cook, who you’ll often find inspiring audiences alongside M.C. Taylor of Hiss Golden Messenger, when he’s not releasing and performing his own perpetually uplifting solo material.

“His energy and spirit were a great part of the sessions,” Jenkins said of Cook. “There’s a song we co-wrote, ‘Genuine Heart.’ I went down to Durham and I had that beginning of a song, and we finished it up and cut a demo that, parts-wise, is very close to what it ended up being. Particularly on that one, that’s a lot of his vibe.”

The results overall were as effective as they were efficient. “All the basic band, rhythm tracks were done in three days, and it was all live for the most part. There were some overdubs, but it was all that band, which was Cameron Ralston, Pinson Chanselle, Alan Parker — who are all Richmond guys — and then Phil Cook from Durham played keys… Those guys are all buddies of mine, so it was a lot of fun. The hang was good.”

That sense of closeness is clearly audible in the band’s playing, which is tight and sensitive in equal measure. And you can hear it loud and clear in Jenkins’ lyrics. The word “sweet” makes multiple appearances, beyond the album’s name and title-track; like in lead single “Ascendant Hog,” where Jenkins sings about “getting lost in the sweetness of your eyes.” But the album is far from saccharine. “Get Together,” which was co-written by White, offers a counterpoint, saying, “All the sweetness I run with was bound to slow me down after a time.” The variety of emotional contexts in which the theme comes back around allows Sweet Bunch to function as a layered meditation on the idea of contentment.

“I was conscious of repeating that word,” Jenkins said, “and I think it gets at what I wanted. I was feeling a number of different things actually writing the songs, song-to-song. [But] expressing a positivity that is more honest about what life is like is something I was trying to do. I feel like sometimes pop lyrics miss one or the other — too angsty or too positive, maybe. So I [was] riding that line a little bit.”

He walked that line with White’s expert in-studio advisement as producer. While the two have made music together since high school, recording Sweet Bunch gave them a chance to chart new collaborative territory. “It felt more like a natural extension than a change,” Jenkins said. “It was a new situation for sure. Him being the producer on my record was a new thing. We’ve recorded stuff in the past, but it was a little more casual. But it was cool for him to be in that role, having produced a bunch of stuff. It was nice. Not full-circle, but a continuation of the story.”

Jenkins was modest when asked about expectations for the album’s reception. But he did point to a moment that promises to be especially sweet: The arrival of freshly pressed vinyl copies of his debut full-length. He said, “I’ll be excited to get it and hold it in my hands.”

I feel the same way.

 

Music Sponsored By Graduate Richmond

 

 

RVA’s Spacebomb Records signs local gospel trio Resound, releases powerful new track, ‘Black History’

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Jessica Fox, Mariah Hargrove, and Joseph Clarke are no strangers to singing. The long-time friends have spent time in recording booths providing backing vocals to other artists until they were called to take center stage, so to speak. The local gospel trio, known as Resound, released their first single, “Black History,” in February and they already have plans for an upcoming album.

“We wanted a name that was spiritual as well as musical,” Fox said of the band. “‘Resound’ means to echo; fill a space with sound. It also means to shout or proclaim. I felt it was perfect.”

For a few years, Resound offered their talents as backing vocals on numerous productions at Spacebomb Records until the RVA record label decided to pull them forward.

“They represent what we do at Spacebomb so well in terms of spirit, improvisation and craft,” said Matthew E. White, local musician and founder of Spacebomb Records in a statement. “The only logical step was to move Resound from being background singers to being up front and the main artist.

After the label signed them, they went into the studio right away to record “Black History” as their first track, which was released Feb. 28.

“Black History” tells a story of struggle and hope, from slavery through the civil rights movement, to the present day. It also features a harmonized cover of the chorus from John Legend and Common’s “Glory”, which was originally featured in the film, Selma.

“When we were arranging “Black History”, we purposely went from despair to hope,” Hargrove said. “We wanted the world to know that we were aware of the state of our country, but that we believe in hope and the giver of that hope, Jesus!”

Fox and Clarke have known each other since childhood, and they met Hargrove about eight years ago.

“They met me while we were doing background vocals for a play,” Hargrove said. “As time went on, we began singing in a lot of community groups, where we were the common denominator.”

The musical journey began when the friends casually recorded themselves singing while setting a table for dinner one night.

Once it was posted online and had gone viral, the singers began to post more videos of themselves. After catching attention of other gospel singers, such as Fred Hammond and Donnie McClurkin, as well as pop stars like Ariana Grande and India.Arie, they’ve since performed on Good Morning America and The Potter House, a benchmark location for their genre.

“We have tours and more music that will be dropping soon,” Clarke said. “We are finally working on an album as well. Great things in store.”

RVA #27: Studio Sampler: Finding a recording home in Richmond

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There were a couple of years during the second George W. Bush administration when I was playing at Curbside Cafe every Thursday night with an acoustic trio called Captain Slicktalk.
During that time, I had a MacBook with Pro Tools installed and (apparently) a ton of time to experiment with recording and mixing. Hours and hours were spent getting to know the Pro Tools interface, learning how to correctly mic a guitar, not learning how to correctly mic a djembe, compressing, fading, and panning.

This article was featured in RVAMag #27: Winter 2016. You can read all of issue #27 here or pick it up at local shops around RVA right now.

Along with a handful of unreleased — and quite possibly unreleasable — recordings, two lasting realizations came out of those years:

One, I loved the process of recording music.

Two, I had no idea what I was doing.

I’ve since learned to lean on people who do know what they’re doing, and I’m lucky enough to live in a city that doubles as a buzzing hive of recording activity. As a huge fan of just about everything Spacebomb does, I’ve watched with reverence as the studio has earned headlines for lending sophisticated arrangements to artists from near (Matthew E. White, Natalie Prass) and far (Foxygen, Slow Club, Georgie). I feel a similar reverence when I visit In Your Ear Studios for their Shockoe Sessions; these networking events provide rare access to their stunning facilities, which host everything from Grammy-winning recording and live performances to audio production for films, video games, and commercials.

Including and beyond Spacebomb and In Your Ear, the options for Richmond bands looking to lay tracks down are many, varied, and often affordable, and even a brief survey of the studios in town is truly inspiring.

You might have caught Shannon Cleary’s article in the magazine’s last issue about The Virginia Moonwalker, the Mechanicsville studio operated by Russell Lacy that’s become popular among local acts. Another space Richmond musicians have latched onto is Scott’s Addition Sound. Offering “a classic mic collection, vintage rack gear and many years of experience,” Scott’s Addition has helped craft — among many other albums — two post-rock masterpieces that loom large in the local section of my own record collection, Shy-Low’s Hiraeth and Everyone Dies In The End’s All Things Lead To This. Both were recorded and mixed by engineer Allen Bergendahl and build expansive soundscapes, reflecting wonderfully Scott’s Addition’s generously sized live room.

Bergendahl’s is a name you’ll see often in the liner notes of Richmond-based recordings, as is Bryan Walthall’s. A popular engineer and producer in his own right, Walthall mastered the last two Lightfields releases, Feelings and Melodies, which were largely recorded and mixed by Bergendahl at Scott’s Addition.

Another name that appears often is Adrian Olsen’s. Olsen and his father Bruce helm Montrose Recording, which is named after the historic former plantation it resides on, just a ten minute drive from downtown. Montrose boasts a wealth of outstanding equipment and a three-bedroom, two-bath guest house, so visiting bands can complete extended projects in comfort. Fans of Avers know that Adrian works on both sides of the board, having served in complementary production and performance roles on the band’s two standout albums, Empty Light and Omega/Whatever. Indie favorites like Futurebirds and Spirit Family Reunion can also be found on Montrose’s client list, along with venerated Richmond names like Steve Bassett and Lindy Fralin.

Driving those ten minutes back into downtown gets you to the doorstep of the studio some would call the city’s most revered, Sound of Music. The facility’s history reaches back more than twenty years to a heyday when ‘90s alternative standard-bearers like Cracker and Carbon Leaf gained acclaim regionally and nationally with recordings made there. When the band I currently play with, Road Kill Roy, was first looking to record, we toured Sound of Music and were floored by the studio’s offerings — recording, mixing, mastering, video production, equipment repair and rental, and live performances all take place there. Founder John Morand has earned a reputation as one of the most gifted engineers in the industry, and he’s served as mentor to a whole generation of aspiring engineers. In fact, one of the studio’s significant contributions has been acting as an incubator for behind-the-board talent.

Pedro Aida is a great example. Aida and Sound of Music first crossed paths in 2002, when he moved to Richmond after earning a certificate from the Conservatory of Recording Arts and Sciences in Tempe and interning with hardcore producer Brian McTernan at Baltimore’s Salad Days Studio. We talked recently in the living room of his family’s home about how he got started in the business.

“My friend Casey was an engineer [at Sound of Music],” Aida remembered, “and I interned for probably eight or nine months, twice a week. We went there and interned all day, before I had a paying assistant engineer job on certain sessions… Carbon Leaf had a record called Indian Summer that they recorded in 2003, and I was on their session. That was a six-month job. I learned a lot. I was an assistant engineer, so I wasn’t anything more than a paid intern — you know, putting up mics, getting lunch, charting sounds… That was a cool experience, watching those songs come to life.”

He even lived at Sound of Music for a time. “Everyone [who works there] lives there at some point,” Aida said, “because it’s free and you’re kind of like the groundskeeper… You help clean up, set up sessions, and you can just hang around and work on stuff.” Aida is who took Road Kill Roy on a tour of Sound of Music, and a handful of years and several sessions later, we’re still working together, having just completed a speedy three-song round of tracking and mixing at Audio Verite — the studio he now owns and operates in a built-out detached garage behind his Lakeside home.

It’s hard to think of Audio Verite as a garage now. It’s split down the middle into a live room and a control room that are separated by an entryway at one end and window at the other. The control room has a comfortable couch, chairs lining the walls, and a massive TV monitor on the back wall, and every now and then, Aida’s incredibly sweet dog Pisco will make an appearance and help you finish a guitar part by licking your hands while you’re playing.

We’ve spent enough time at Audio Verite for it to feel like a second home for the band, but the hours we do spend there are jam-packed. “One thing that I bring to the table is [being] quick,” Aida said. “I know what I want out of the recording and I know how to get it, and as soon as I get it, we move on.”

Studio efficiency is any band’s best friend, and guitarist Kenneth Close affirmed that Aida’s pace is part of why Positive No returned to Audio Verite for a new round of recordings. “We worked with him on our ‘Automatic Cars’ single and his flexibility in working quickly at a good price was a big influencer in us coming back, along with being pleased with the final product. I’m extremely picky about drums sounding big and he’s managed to help us achieve that without 30-foot ceilings.”

Aida maintains a relentless sense of momentum — he even speaks quickly, I noticed while interviewing him for this article — which has prevented Road Kill Roy from getting bogged down by excessive ornamentation or easily-fixed imperfections. “I’m not an audio nerd,” he confessed. “I’m not an audiophile.” As part of a band where everyone has kids and time is tight, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate his approach. Add in the fact that our singer, Mike Raybould, did carpentry work on the facility, earning us some studio time, and you can see why going back to Pedro was a no-brainer for us.

But for other bands — groups just starting out or musicians looking to achieve a specific sound — the choice of where to record can be a complex one, made especially complex by the fact that there are so many good options in Richmond. I asked Aida about how to go about making that decision.

“The first thing bands [should] think of is the sounds the engineer has put out in the past.” He mentioned Steve Barber, Bob Rupe, Alan Weatherhead, and Kevin Willoughby as respected colleagues, and he praised Montrose and Scott’s Addition for their ability to capture specific sounds. “Montrose… there are some really cool studios in town that you don’t hear about all the time but do really cool, more organic, big-room stuff. Scott’s Addition Sound… they have a big room, but it’s also very tight, with the tile ceilings.”

Aida went on to note Sound of Music’s versatility. “John [Morand] is so diverse in what he can do. But I always liked things John did that were more folky, or even garage-y, like Cracker, or things like Carbon Leaf where you get that Sparklehorse [sound] — that slow, folky, big, lots of old lo-fi gear, talk box stuff.”

Location, scheduling, and cost were other factors Aida pointed to. “Once you know your budget, that narrows down the studios that you can go to, which is still a lot of them. I think most studios in town now are at that same rate — mid-level, $35 to $45 an hour.”

While Aida acknowledged the warmth of analog, he issued words of caution about the expense of recording to tape. “When I started at Sound of Music, my first few sessions were on tape. It definitely has this warmth to it, and this nice compression, especially if you have a solid drummer. But it’s very expensive.”

One way musicians can keep costs low, regardless of whether they choose digital or analog, is to show up ready. “Be prepared,” Aida advised. “New [drum] heads, new strings, that kind of stuff. Know the parts. If you want to use studio time to rehearse, that’s fine. I’ll take the money. But for your sake, I’d rather you be as ready as possible.”

Aida placed less emphasis on how extensively studios are outfitted, though he talked about acquiring his current drum set as a turning point for Audio Verite. At the same time, he acknowledged the significant role band members’ own gear plays. “Starting off with good equipment from the musician’s standpoint is important. If you have a good drummer and a good drum set — a good drum sound — then you’re already 80% of the way toward a good recording.”

Drum considerations can be decidedly different for hip hop and electronic artists. “There are people out there who work in a digital realm where that’s all they do,” Aida said. “They’re really good [at] sequencing, MIDI, Reason, and programming drums, getting them to sound really good and real… that’s what they bring to the table.” I was immediately reminded of Jellowstone Records mastermind Devonne Harris (DJ Harrison), known across several of Richmond’s musical circles as the prolific producer of beat tapes like his landmark Stashboxxx album, and as the keyboardist of soulful jazz outfit Butcher Brown.

Aida is also used to sharing producing and performing duties. He currently both plays guitar in and plays engineer to punk band Ann Beretta. “I recorded them before I was in the band,” Aida said. “I recorded Rob [Huddleston] in a producer-engineer sense, so he was very open to ‘Let’s do it this way, let’s do it that way.’ They’ve always come back to me. Now that I’m in the band, we’ve just kept that mentality going. ‘I’m recording your band that I just happen to play guitar in now.’ We’re doing our new record here next year and starting some stuff now. I’m really excited about it.”

Aida’s passion for recording runs deep, especially when it comes to people, reflecting how, ultimately, your studio decision should come down to who you’re happiest working alongside. “My favorite thing in general about recording,” Aida stated, “is connecting with all of the people in the bands… When I can get with a band or project [where] everybody’s cool and the songs are good, it doesn’t feel like work. I almost feel bad getting paid for it sometimes.”