Recorded in July and September, 2017, in the former Atomic Garden studio, East Palo Alto, California
"One of the more dangerous assertions made about nostalgia is that it's inherently regressive - that harboring an intimate connection to our personal histories precludes us from connecting to the present. twenty two sixteen's debut release offers as strong a counterargument as one could hope for in a world as cynical and distracted as the one we're stuck in. With unapologetic volume and grandiosity, the band reaches for an age when we were less worn down and smoothed over, grasping fiercely at at feelings more strongly felt. A collection of songs born out of and refined through years of long, improvised, blown-out performances, twenty two sixteen taps into an almost meditative state, where elongated and smeared memories are opened up, inhabited, and brought firmly into the now. These songs establish a dense scenery, built up and colored in by change through repetition. To dwell on a thought isn't necessarily a sign of stasis - twenty two sixteen gives us the time and space to check in with ourselves, fully and thoroughly, again and again." - Ben Lovell (lung cycles, lily tapes and discs)
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twenty two sixteen began at a Foxing show in November 2015. David and Adam knew each other from childhood, and Adam and Emmerich knew each other from college radio. At that show the three of them met up for the first time, and they decided to start an emo band on the spot.
In previous months Adam and Emmerich had been playing longform free-improv noise, jettisoning choruses and hooks for blasted waves of sound. When David brought in twenty two sixteen's first song, it immediately grew from three minutes to thirty. The band also cut its teeth on a half-hour drone cover of "Born to Run." A friend of the band, Tyler Walicek, joined for some early practices and made the overall volume even more overwhelming. In the concrete dark of the naval base vault where they practiced, the presiding unit of measurement seemed less like a song and more like a self-hypnosis session. A ten minute jam was considered brief.
Like a lot of bands, twenty two sixteen doubled as an oblique therapy group. All three band members sang and shouted a lot together. But even though the lyrics evolved from different personal struggles, it felt less important to communicate those specifics than it did to transform them into a unified state of mind, and to let them be a free-flowing current in the extreme loudness of everything else. If you scream in a storm, you can get a lot out of your system, but you can also tap into a very different kind of system, one much more powerful than yours.
Before Adam moved away from the Bay Area in July 2017, twenty two sixteen decided to make a formal document of all their music. In the preceding months they condensed their songs to 7–15 minutes in length, refining everything gradually and privately. (The band played only one show before recording.)
Jack Shirley at the Atomic Garden recorded all the basic tracks two days before Adam left for Minnesota. The band recorded live as much of the music as possible, including the vocals, hoping to get close to the feeling of being in these songs as they grew and shifted. David and Emmerich finished overdubs in September.
There will be at least one more album.
credits
released December 10, 2019
Written and performed by:
Emmerich Anklam
David Pardo
Adam Pearson
Produced, recorded, mixed, and mastered by:
Jack Shirley
Art by:
Justine Selsing (front)
Zylucas Ilwirfskas (back)
As we were formulating these tunes, going to the Real Life Rock and Roll Band shows in 2015 and 2016 felt extremely important to us. twenty two sixteen
One of our favorite bands—they seem to approach music the same way we do - maybe jazzier: improvisational jams become vital, gnarly songs led by an earnest voice. twenty two sixteen
The video for "Theurgist," from True Widow's forthcoming "Avvolgere," is as prismatic & hypnotic as the song it accompanies. Bandcamp New & Notable Aug 15, 2016
