YOU WANT dreaminess?
Kalbells, the collaborative synthpop-cum-artpop project of Kalmia Traver, Angelica Bess, Sarah Pedinotti, and Zoë Brecher, has just dropped a dear little nugget of Eighties-inflected pillowtalk bliss, “Diagram Of Me Sleeping”; yet another reason to get yourself booked aboard the first flight out on their album Max Heart, which is coming out on March 26th via NNA Tapes.
We’ve got that new single embedded down below; it’s languid, make you want to pull the covers up close and tight, swoon to some romantic sax licks, playful lyrics, a blissed out backing chorale.
Kalmia says “I woke up one morning and my legs felt relaxed and pillowy like two lovers tangled together in mindless warmth; it was pleasant beyond the sensical and I wrote this song.
“I’ve come to crave sleep almost like love itself. Sleep is where so much of our creativity happens, in dreams and in the spaces between them.
“I love thinking of my body as a landscape, and sleep is the time I get to roam it freely.” And doesn’t it sound an ode to R.E.M., the unconscious, delicious hours spent zzzing out?
She adds about the recording aspect: “I especially loved tracking drums and bass on this recording. We were recording straight to tape at Outlier Inn in the Catskills and the sounds we were getting for Zoë and Sarah were sending shivers up our spines; we were prancing around all giddy.
“I mixed Max Heart (my first time mixing an album! – I taught myself the skill of mixing during the initial Covid quarantine, alone for four months in my apartment in NYC) and mixing this song was so easy because the sounds we got were so good and the song was simple.
“It was very satisfying and created a blueprint for mixing the rest of the record.”
“Diagram Of Me Sleeping” follows the cosmic pop of the previous single, “Purplepink”, which we embraced wholeheartedly right over here and of which we said: “Sparks are certainly frickin’ flying on ‘Purplepink’, a track which seems to pull waaay into warp speed with that electro-psych blueprint laid out by Tame Impala and suchlike, and leaves ’em choking on astral dust.”
With a need to escape Planet Earth like never before, make sure you’ve got a boarding pass for Max Heart: it’s available to pre-order now over at Bandcamp, It’s out on March 26th on digital, CD, trad black and limited edition salty pickle-green vinyl.
Follow Kalbells on Facebook, at their website and on Twitter and Instagram.
