Phaeton - Biome CS

Phaeton, the mythic 10th planet in the solar system, was said to have been made entirely of ice and destroyed by a devastating cosmic event billions of years in the past. Legend has it that the ice shards fell to earth, seeding the planet with the abundance of water that created the conditions for verdant life we know today.

Today, Phaeton consists of siblings Matthew Gallagher (Machine Listener, Le Creuset, R&D) and Luke Gallagher (Mindlink). On "Biome," they put to tape the beauty, power, and mystery of our planet's farthest-flung regions. Inspired by new age concepts, ecology, and evolutionary biology, they infuse a love of balmy new age records with touches of kosmiche, drone, and dub, laying down tracks that are simultaneously soft and tough, dreamy and lucid, synthetic and organic.

Recorded over a 72 hour period at R&D in Cleveland, OH, and mixed and mastered by Bill Denison in Belmont, MA, each track on "Biome" honors a different animal of spiritual significance, and the record as a whole brings to life the astonishing beauty of the natural forces that surround and comprise us, too often taken for granted.

For all the earthliness that the duo makes explicit, the tension of these sonic contradictions pushes Biome into a subtly alien, surreal, and psychedelic territory. By the end of the record you're floating - where exactly is up for debate - but you're surely no longer earthbound.