1 LP
With its meditative tempos and enveloping guitar work by Michio Kurihara, “A Sky Record” offers shelter from the squall. If it has the glow of a long-delayed reunion between friends, that’s not accidental: Kurihara hasn’t traveled outside of Japan in some time, so Damon and Naomi hadn’t recorded with him in nearly ten years.
When they finally made it back to Japan in November 2019 for a brief tour, they were elated to book some time with Kurihara at the aptly named studio Peace Music. In those long stretches of quarantime, the tracks they returned from Japan with had distinct moods but not yet any lyrics. Naomi first struck upon the appropriate tone when re-reading the journals of one of her favorite abstract painters, Charles Burchfield. From there, the floodgates opened.