Spare Bedroom Studio

La Dispute has never been a band prone to settling. The five-piece from Grand Rapids, Michigan, is responsible for some of the most uncompromising, experimental hardcore music of the last decade. From their 2008 debut (in their current formation) Somewhere at the Bottom of the River Between Vega and Altair, to 2011’s Wildlife, to 2015’s Rooms of the House, La Dispute have continually pushed themselves to find new ways to portray some of the most difficult and universally affecting subject matters. Casting a wide stylistic net that includes – but isn’t limited to – jazz, blues, spoken word, screamo and prog rock, La Dispute have developed a sound that, while constantly evolving, is unmistakably theirs.

To us, the spirit of the album lives in the sessions we did in the town of Alexandra in a farmhouse on the lake. The story was always the most important thing to tell; Bendigo the most important thing to portray. It was kind of like one of those TV cooking show challenges; where you get five ingredients, a George Foreman grill and whatever’s in the fridge - and you have to go make the best meal you can…

Smiley Smile is the 12th studio album by American rock band the Beach Boys, released on September 18, 1967. Devised as a simplified version of their then-forthcoming Smile—a different, much more elaborately constructed LP—Smiley Smile contrasts significantly with its minimalist approach and Lo-Fi production. Its music is often cited for having positive effects during an LSD comedown, and was used by at least one drug clinic to help relieve users from bad trips. Regarded as a forerunner to certain bedroom pop acts, in 1974, it was voted the 64th greatest album of all time by NME writers and, in 2000, it was one of 100 albums featured in the book The Ambient Century as a landmark in the development of ambient music.

A show played perfectly to an empty bar. A singer with life and death on his shoulders, swinging a microphone like Samson swung a jawbone. The real ones who die with nothing half the time. With SALT AS WOLVES, Jeffrey Foucault gives us in sound and image what poet and author Chris Dombrowski calls in the album’s liner notes, “that rare artistic combination of a voice and a world”: a tough, spare collection of darkly rendered blues and ballads, like a field recording of a place that never existed. In a series of letters to lovers, friends, heroes, and family, Foucault deftly weaves together disparate strands of sound and experience, raw love, and hard wisdom.