Check out more of Ryan Alexander Lloyd’s work here.

Happy thanksgiving everyone. Just wanted to let all of you know that from today through to Monday morning, you can get yourself a copy of A Maze and Amazement for whatever you like. No minimum. Get it for free, or choose to pay something for it. Zero pressure. But do hurry up, this deal is only good for the weekend!

Lawson Fletcher writes:

“I think much of post-rock nowadays has shed the initial ambition and weight of the world of the earlier stuff, like it had to tear everything apart and rise only from a broken rubble, and has concentrated on using the same musical elements to make just shamelessly emotive and pretty music. (…) It’s like post-rock that has shed its ambition to thunderously document the apocalypse and turn inward once again, to explore emotional soundscapes. Still uses textured guitar, beaten, stalling drum-work, stretched out compositions, soft-textural vocals, spectral guitar timbres, etc. but it is to what these stylistic features are put in service of that is distinct, here.”

“Along these lines, A Maze and Amazement takes the atmospheric lessons learned and reverses the equation – the long tails and heady elements no longer thunderous signals of the social crumbling, but crimson internalisations of the personal, of thought and heart.”

Read Lawson’s full discussion on his (con)temporary blog…

During these past months I’ve been trapped in this horrid cycle of falling asleep around five in morning and sleeping well into the afternoon. Every night (or morning) I would set my cell phone alarm for a reasonable hour and tell myself that tomorrow would be the day that I would manage to wrestle myself out of bed at a decent hour. However, the bloody alarm was so abrasive, I always ended up turning it off and going back to sleep just to recover from the shock of it all. A futile attempt at resetting my internal clock.

Anyhow, fast forward (through months of misery) to the day before yesterday. I had been thinking about it for weeks: I needed a proper alarm clock. In fact, maybe I needed 3 or 4 of them. I had this odd idea of setting up alarm clocks in my living room, facing my neighbor’s bedroom. Why facing my neighbors bedroom, you might ask? Well because I am rotten at taking care of myself, but I am still a pretty decent guy, and so I figured, where rational self-interest was clearly failing me, maybe a sprinkle of contrived altruism might do the trick.

Well, I finally bought an alarm clock the other day – just one. The result, thus far? The last two days I’ve risen at 8.30 in the morning. My neighbor? Still sound asleep.

The moral of this story? Turns out I had my alarm clock set to Kiwi FM, which, so I learned this morning, is featuring my album, A Maze and Amazement, as this week’s “album of the week”. They’re giving away copies of the album, too, so be sure to listen in to Kiwi to get a copy (I am told between 10 in the morning and 2 in the afternoon on weekdays is the best time to hear our songs).

Hours of daylight ahead!

As a musician – as a human being, really – I have to be able to accept responsibility for my failures as willingly as I accept responsibility for that which I might succeed in. Ruthless critical self-examination, after all, is nothing short of a necessity for personal and artistic growth. Zach’s review helped me pinpoint a few things I will have to improve upon in the future – and you know what’s great? I’m really looking forward to it.

When did nostalgia become so damn beautiful? I’ve never really had patience with the emotion, myself – spending too much time thinking about illusory, idyllic visions of the past (that was never really better than the present, anyway) has always seemed like a waste of precious time. But after spending some precious time with the first full-length from New Zealand’s The Enright House, A Maze and Amazement, I can’t be so sure. All I know is that once you step into the hazy world of past and present, fact and fiction conjured by the quartet, it’s difficult to differentiate between reality and illusion, and that’s just the way it should be. Read the full review…

The Lumiere Arts Reader has just published a massive review/feature on us and the new album, giving us 4 out of 5 stars! Here’s a short excerpt of what Brannavan Gnanalingam has to say:

A Maze and Amazement LP is a beautiful album, complex and dense, but highly accessible. It’s a languid dream, shifting between melancholy and uplift, heavy on mood and texture. In other words, it could probably be described under the term “post-rock”, but there is so much happening here, it’s a little too reductive to try and sum it up in a term or two.

All this has resulted in a rather shimmering piece of work. A Maze and Amazement LP could be accused of over-extending itself at times (and potentially use a little trimming at points), but it’s ambitious and gorgeous to listen to. While approaching his music from an intellectual angle, it’s also a stirring piece of work, that reveals more and more to you every listen. Unlike say, Godspeed! You Black Emperor which thunderously document an apocalypse, this is much more personal, much more insular. “I think music that has a lot of heart in it, a lot of thought in it, can be beautiful and simple and still leave enough complexity for people to discover. And discovery takes time.”

The whole article can be found online at the Lumiere Reader’s website, but be forewarned: the feature is absolutely epic in length (over 2000 words)! Don’t get me wrong, I actually think this is the most interesting interview I’ve ever done in terms of the actual discussion, but don’t say I didn’t warn you about the length… even my Mom is going to have a tough time getting through this one! :)

To download the podcast rather than stream it, just right-click this link and save.

I’ve been meaning to create podcasts about songs and their production for quite some time now, but just haven’t been able to find the time to make any inroads into those plans… that is, until today.

I’m still trying to figure out how best to go about these, as I fully intend to complete one short podcast about each of the songs on A Maze and Amazement. This first attempt is a roughly 9 minute podcast and is all about “We Might As Well Have Stayed Young”. Hope you enjoy it, and be sure to keep an eye out for more of these in the future.

Finally, you can download the full song as a 320 bit MP3 file

Mary is generally very good at living. She is highly intelligent, well-educated, and enviably successful at making sound and moral decisions in her life. She also happens to be a poet with a marvelous knack for transforming the familiar and forgotten into something odd, gentle and worth remembering:

Somewhere Between Here and There

At dusk, when tide is low, the silver water turns dull
unpolished and scratched by wind that growls
across the tips of waves, choppy as a see-saw.
The fish are lined up on the shore like soldiers,
washed up after bobbing along the froth.
Rattling, red-brown leaves shake on branches
and, shaking off inhibitions, fly away with a dry rustle,
scratching together airborn–like insect wings.
The smell of the salt off the sea is dry;
it sticks in the throat before the wind
changes directions, but leaves a scaly aftertaste.
The fish on the sand are the biggest I’ve ever seen,
swollen and half-buried beneath drifts of salt and sand.
I reached over and traced the edges of the scales,
dry instead of wet, glinting like well-worn pennies.
Their mouths were open tunnels, big enough to hold
a matchbox racecar, but lined with white teeth,
tiny as maggots, nothing inside but ink.
The eye sockets were deep and dark,
the gelatinous membranes eaten away,
empty as a playroom outgrown and abandoned
somewhere between here and there.

Songs of ours where Mary’s poetry can be heard:

An old piece of mine called One Of Many Dinner Conversations [mp3 6.3MB], and two songs off of the new album, A Maze and Amazement, called Solitaire [video on cliptip] and Remember The Stillness.

Remember The Stillness
Solitaire

I can’t rememember the precise moment when I started paying more attention to the combination of spoken word and music, but suffice it to say it’s been a few years now, and my interest in it continues to intensify. Here are three marvelous examples from the classical world:

Exerpt from Knee 5 by Philip Glass (from his opera “Einstein On The Beach”):

Philip Glass – Knee 5

Exerpt from Steve Reich’s The Cave:

Exerpt from Delta Run by Annea Lockwood:

Annea Lockwood – Delta Run