Wilder Maker – Last Call at the Star’s Ascent

Brooklyn quartet Wilder Maker shares “Last Call at the Star’s Ascent,” one final single from Smoking the Bunny, the second volume of their trilogy of improvisation-based LPs, following last year’s The Streets Like Beds Still Warm. The album is due Friday (Nov 6) via Western Vinyl, with guest appearances from Katie Von Schleicher, Macie Stewart, Joseph Shabason, Chuck Johnson, Kitba, and more.

“‘Last Call At The Star’s Ascent’ is the first track I finished across the entire three LP arc (Smoking the Bunny is LP2), and I remember playing it for the band and realizing that I could actually make music that sounded like this, doing whatever the hell I wanted,” Gabriel Birnbaum says. “I built a drum machine out of old tape machine breakbeats and played it by hand, and then ran it through the ‘Interference’ setting on the Chroma Console to create hitches and hiccups. I pitch-shifted the original vocals to create a choir of robotic harmonies. I wrote a lyric alternating jokes with despair and decay. Last call is a time of chaos when all the rules are upside down and as such it is a time of great beauty and freedom.”

The process for these records is a unique one, inspired more by Jeff Parker, Bex Burch, SML, etc than by any rock band or by how WM has worked in the past. The band (Adam Brisbin, Nick Jost, Sean Mullins, sometimes Katie Von Schleicher) improvised together in the studio for a few days. Then Birnbaum holed up with the material and edited and processed it and carved it into song shapes and wrote over it, improvising with his voice and comping until he had a full vocal part, which he then wrote lyrics to.

Smoking the Bunny is the second in a planned trilogy of records by Brooklyn-based avant-indie outfit Wilder Maker. It is sonically and conceptually ambitious, expansive, groovy, poetic, cinematic – both strange and familiar. As with its predecessor, the initial sounds that populate this record were captured pristinely at Figure 8 Recordings in Brooklyn before Birnbaum ran much of it through tape machines and guitar pedals and then back into computers for further editing.

The LP release party takes place November 6 at Union Pool in Brooklyn, with Scree, Mutual Benefit, and Katie Von Schleicher DJing between sets. Tickets are available here.

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