While students at Oberlin College, Nick Weiss and Logan Takahashi clicked over a shared love of classic house and techno records that prompted them to make “some kind of dance music that wasn’t just emulating what we were hearing”. The duo’s music often forms out of melodies, samples or concepts that through jamming and improvisation organically materialize into full-fledged compositions. However, for 7AM, their debut LP, they have also sharpened their focus and concentrated on structures, creating a set of 9 entirely new tracks that, while undoubtedly sounding cleaner and more polished, have more importantly lost none of the band’s intrigue and penchant for free-flowing experimentation. Rather than relying on triggering loops, or sequencing on a computer the music is performed and composed, resulting in a form of discourse between the band and their instruments. The result is an a-typical one for electronic dance music- textures and tones that move along with a firm rhythm but still retain an distinctly human and emotional core.

From the dramatic break that splits “Forever the Feeling” down the middle, to the soulful heart-break of “Dancing in Slow Motion”, featuring the vocal talents of Shannon Funchess, of Light Asylum, to the gloriously euphoric gospel-tinged trance of “Cheaters”, it is clear that 7AM is a major leap forwards from anything they’ve done before. The title, in the bands words “is meant to evoke the sort of confused, dreamy, half-awake, half-asleep state that one experiences after staying up all night partying”. Somewhere between bliss, exhaustion, melancholy, start of a new day, end of a night”. And indeed, 7AM is simultaneously haunting, off-kilter, moving and addictive.

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