Recording together, performing together and finding their own very special sound together. What they have created here is a beautiful blend of atmospheric, warmly acoustic and howling, pining slide guitar with Eric Anders haunting vocals filling the space with longing and melancholy…in the best possible way.
This track comes off the duo’s album “Of All These Things,” which came out this summer and was recorded at The Pie Studios in Pasadena. Pasadena seems to complement the mood and the magic somehow. This song is gentle, meandering but still holds on to the urgency of the message, with echoes of REM and Moby. It’s the kind of song you play when you want to remember, when you are driving the long way home, or when you are leaving something far behind.
Eric and Mark are careful, thoughtful musicians, crafting every moment of the song, holding on to long phrases, expanding on the reverb and tumbling in the spaces between the notes. They create an epic sound, a sound that fills your mind, spilling out in warm, cinematic, vibrations.
“Matterbloomlight” is an ode to George Saunders’ exquisite novel, “Lincoln In The Bardo,” the Mann Booker Prize-winning novel about Abraham Lincoln and the death of his young son Willie. Both Eric and Mark have their own young families and I can only image that they were as moved as the rest of us by this story of such a man and his profound grief. Whatever the beginnings the song or their purpose for writing it, what they are have created is powerful and mournful and forgiving and brilliant…loved it.
- Eric Anders and Mark O’Bitz
- “Matterbloomlight”