VULTURE FEATHER - Liminal Fields - LP - Bone Coloured Vinyl [JUN 2]

LP - Limited Edition Bone Coloured Vinyl. 

Vulture Feather is a post/pre/future punk band formed from the mountains of northern California featuring members of the Baltimore band Wilderness. These songs are amorphous vessels encapsulating the dream-like, liminal fields that all of us as beings are passing through from one moment to the next. The spaces in between the events that seem to be arising incessantly from the powerful projector that is our mind. Beyond the reaches of time, neither remaining nor departing.

Colin McCann didn’t pick up a guitar for nearly ten years. The Northern-California-based songwriter, previously performing under Long Dog Bird, had been creating music with longtime friend and collaborator Brian Gossman for much of their adult lives with early-00s Baltimore-based band Wilderness. So what would cause such a stagnant period? And how could McCann find his way back to the joy that music had once so easily conjured? The answer was to go back to the very beginning, where the kinetic forces that urged McCann to make music in the first place could emerge once again. But first, he had to make space in his internal world; a kind of silence where he could hear the exhale of his past, and the blossoming of a new song. That blossoming would soon become the first songs for McCann’s latest project Vulture Feather.

The band’s debut album Liminal Fields exists on an intangible plane: a crack in the concrete, a gauze between worlds. For as long as McCann can recall, he’s been using music as a vehicle to try and connect with an underlying, indescribable nature that only the sonic world seems to be able to reach. “There’s a feeling of ecstasy that comes when one merges with music,” he says. “It’s what calls us all back again and again to listen, to sing, and to play.” McCann had been striving to reach this outlying environment throughout his career, often stretching in ways that eventually came to negatively impact his life, and his health. The wake up call came when McCann suffered a near-death experience, eerily predicted by a friend through a dream she had had almost a year earlier.

Newly awoken to the beauty of being alive, McCann strove to slow down, to listen to the inherent nature in all living things, and to rediscover our mutual connectivity. He stopped playing and listening to music, and instead soaked himself in the cacophony of silence. Then without any epiphany or grand catalyst, something urged McCann to pick up a guitar again. Ideas flowed more naturally than ever, and he soon realized that the liminal space he had been searching for was there all along he only had to listen. McCann tentatively reached out to Gossman to collaborate and the friends found themselves once again jamming together, in an off-grid quonset hut where they now practice. “It was like no time had passed,” McCann says. “That feeling of ecstatic joy, of forgetting your own name, came flooding back.” They were soon joined by another old friend, Eric Fiscus, who completed Vulture Feather on drums. 

RIYL: Wilderness, Ought, Shame, Protomartyr, Gold Class, Dry Cleaning, Fontaines DC, Unwound, Fugazi, Jawbox

Tracklist:

01. Inseparable
02. Bad Land
03. Bell of Renewal
04. Your True Face
05. Monument
06. Be Still
07. Illusion of Time
08. Ballad of Pelletreau