Hammock is:
Marc Byrd
Andrew Thompson
Record label: Hammock Music
www.hammockmusic.com
Working in music is bittersweet. Bitter because you almost always have to deal with other people's ideas and preferences that don't necessarily suit your personal taste. Sweet because regardless of the style or quality, you're still getting to work on music and it sure beats digging a ditch. Both Marc Byrd and Andrew Thompson produce, write songs, twist knobs and play several different instruments. They have each spent years in different bands traveling in vans and buses, performing in front of anyone who was willing to listen. However, these days they spend most of their time behind the scenes, working on other people's music. Marc has even had a song he co-wrote beamed up into space to wake the astronauts on two different space shuttle missions. Marc and Andrew consider themselves fortunate. But there are times when the need to create your own thing begins to interrupt your life. And if you don't give in to that need, everything else begins to suffer.
And so, with no agenda or expectation in mind, Marc and Andrew began getting together periodically to let the sounds inside of them find their way out into the open. There was no band, no record label breathing down their necks and really, no plan to make a full-blown recording for release. But after numerous sessions of creating and fumbling around, they looked up to realize that they had recorded around thirty pieces of music. And so this melding of music, space, passion, years of hard work and wide-open spaces became a new band...Hammock.
The sixteen pieces chosen for Hammock's first release, entitled Kenotic, evoke endless sky and the open Southern landscape. Kenotic is all at once ambient, post-rock, dreamy, lush, melodic, and atmospheric, a soundscape inspired by stillness, beauty, emptiness and silence. This is a band and an album that makes you notice the world around you by filling up the space within you. And like the world outside-like the empty space within, this music overflows with beauty and tension, melancholy and hope. All equally abiding.
www.hammockmusic.com
Musical Influences: Hammock has long admired artists like Brian Eno, Mogwai, Stars of the Lid, Michael Hedges, the Church, Labradford, the Cure, LOW, Steve Roach, Boards of Canada, Cocteau Twins, Explosions in the Sky, William Ackerman, Sigur Ros, Thom Brennan, Slowdive, Sianspheric, Yume Bitsu, Tetsu Inoue, Album Leaf, Idaho, Tom Heasley, Bowery Electric, Red House Painters, Jeff Pearce, My Bloody Valentine, windy & carl, the Dead Texan, the Smiths, Unwed Sailor, Robert Rich, John Cage, Harold Budd, Landing, Broken Social Scene, the Six Parts Seven, Godspeed You Black Emperor, Arvo Part, Airiel, Air Formation, Paik, Spacemen3.
Check out the artist's website:
http://www.hammockmusic.comTrack List:
1. Before the Celebration
2. The Air Between Us
3. Through a Glass Darkly
4. Blankets of Night
5. Winter Light
6. Miles to go before I Sleep
7. Wish
8. Overcast/Sorrow
9. Glacial
10. Kenotic
11. Stars in the Rearview Mirror
12. You may Emerge from this More Dead than Alive
13. What Heaven Allows
14. the Silence
15. Dawn begins to Creep
16. Rising Tide
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