Kil'n Time

In the three years that have passed since the release of Ghostly's Idol Tryouts compilation, Ghostly and its brother label Spectral Sound have brached out beyond their roots in Ann Arbor under the guidance of Sam Valenti IV, who has built a shamelessly diverse roster of artists from around the globe. Idol Tryouts Two is an expansive document of this maturation, offering a plentitude of exclusive material separated into two discs distinguished as Avant-Pop and SMM.
Avant-Pop denotes a distinct brand of off-center pop treasures - it follows no formula, but you know it when you hear it. On this disc, exclusive tracks from Skeletons & The Girl-Faced Boys, Mobius Band, and the rest of the Ghostly roster document the crossroads where the avant-garde and the popular converge…

Like many musical projects planned for 2020, the plans of the Ehnes Quartet to record Beethoven’s late quartets underwent a drastic revision. Rather than cancel the project, some ingenious technology was employed. James Ehnes takes up the story ‘Our quartet was greatly looking forward to a week of recording in the United Kingdom in August 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic made it impossible for us to travel to the UK, and for our UK-based producer, Simon Kiln, to travel to us. We were, however, able to take advantage of the wonders of modern technology by recording in the USA with Simon (producer Simon Kiln) monitoring the sessions in real time in London A fortunate benefit of not traveling overseas for these recordings was that the days we had scheduled for travel become additional recording days, allowing us to record all of Beethoven’s string quartets from Op. 74 onwards. The four CD’s we recorded during this intense two-week period will always be treasured reminders for us of a brief, bucolic window of artistic fulfilment during a terribly challenging period for the world’.