Between the vicissitudes of the Internet and the short life spans of independent street magazines, much of my writing of the past decade and a half has evaporated like dew on a summer morning. “Throwback Thursday” provides an opportunity to revisit some of those projects and archive them on The Evening Class, the little blog that keeps on chugging when all those websites with their bells and whistles have long since bit the dust.
BUMP (acronym for Boise Underground Music Pages) was the brainchild of Sara Konizeski and Molly Seiniger. It was a lively music magazine offered free to Boise’s music-loving community, focused on highlighting Boise’s uncharted live local music scene. BUMP, largely volunteer-driven, provided a free platform that assisted local music lovers and makers to find and participate in Boise’s truly amazing underground music scene by profiling local acts and compiling a calendar of performances at Boise’s venues.
I’m grateful to Derek Spencer Longoria Gomez for convincing me to contribute to the magazine and I only regret I didn’t write more for them while they were in existence. Under the pseudonym of “Maya”, I interviewed the then-new group Ealdor Bealu for BUMP’s third issue in July 2017. Ealdor Bealu is currently on tour in the Southwest and—as a little shout-out to them on the road—I’m using this week’s “Throwback Thursday” to remind them of their humble beginnings with their first album and the onset of what has proven to be enduring friendships with its band members.
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| Photo: © Michael Guillén (2022). |
Ealdor Bealu has been together for about two years; its original incarnation for the album being Carson Russell—the band's guitarist, vocalist, and samples editor, art director and album co-producer (let alone their self-appointed "spirit guide"), Rylie Collingwood on bass and vocals, Alex Wargo on drums, bells, chimes, glockenspiel, saxophone and oud, and Travis Abbot on guitars. Wargo has moved on to New York City by way of Texas and Craig Hawkins has joined the band as their touring drummer.
As is so often the morphology of bands in the Treasure Valley, Carson began with Craig and Riley in a party rock band called Mother Shipton. When that project ended, Russell spent the next year upgrading his gear, writing songs and developing early versions of what was to become the filmic projection. In 2015, Carson, Riley and original drummer Alex built up the skeletal framework of Ealdor Bealu, and then that summer brought in Travis Abbott on guitars to round out the group with a fourth member.
At the album's Bandcamp page, Ealdor Bealu is described as a "heavy psych" band: "With a focus on shifting dynamics from the ambient to the massive and back again, their sound is both minimalist and maximalist with hints at the unknown core of our existence and the world beyond this reality." With blue-shocked hair and an infectious laugh, Riley simplifies the description of the band's sound as "doomy", whereas—with the 50-year anniversary of San Francisco's "Summer of Love" on my mind—this former San Franciscan finds it reminiscent of 60's acid rock inflected as contemporary neo-psychedelia. Carson adjusts that perception to "heavy psychedelia", whereas guitarist Travis Abbot prefers the term "hope metal" or "glitter doom" (gloom). "There's something uplifting to the necessary evil that must exist," he grins darkly. Admittedly, as the band was building up the pieces, they were trying to hit more than just one genre, which might account for why a description of their sound remains assertively protean.
Craig Hawkins, friends with Russell since third grade, was a sure shot to step in as drummer, and understands that music genres are usually defined by the rhythm or tempo of the music, as well as the tonalities used. Metal often uses aggressive distortion tones, and—if it's speed metal—it's obviously being played fast. The "doom" element reference the slow parts in the songs, which run in cycles, again and again, changing subtly on the second or third cycles. Ealdor Bealu incorporated those elements from doom music, though the band members are clearly not doomy bitter people. Riley, in fact, envisions doom music as a sprawling landscape with jagged rocks, or a dry desert stretching out in all directions.
The album itself is seamless in the way each song flows into the next, providing an accessible and satisfying listening experience. This was a purposeful focus on Russell's part—to make an album that felt like an entire experience—and it turned out even better than he projected. The idea started out as something the band was trying to do with their live sets. At their first show, they had five songs, which had been crafted not to be "just" songs, experienced separately, but songs that were meant to weave in and out of each other. "Like a Pink Floyd experience," Russell explains, "where nothing either stops or starts; but blends together." From that first show through the experience of recording the album to their more current performances, Russell has been interweaving more sampling between tracks, and more elements between instruments, in an effort to make the music a gestalt experience, unified whole and intact, both in their live sets and on the recorded album. Of course working on the album afforded more time to work towards that goal, which has not been always easy to accomplish live (where volume levels are often not correct or Wargo would keep misplacing his mallets).
At the Neurolux album release performance, value was added to the experience through the projection of a film montage behind the musicians, whose assemble edit was engineered by Carson. As he was writing the bass and guitar tracks for the band's songs, he was exploring a public domain website where he found available stock footage. As he built a song, he built the film sequence for it, and connected them together for the first set they played more than a year and a half ago. The songs themselves are timed out to the film; but, it's difficult to play a 13-minute song live and have it align second-by-second with a film. Thus, they decided early on not to be concerned with perfection, opting instead for passion. Equally, they decided to share the film on YouTube where the timed alignment between film and music as intended could be experienced as intended, exact and in a way nearly impossible to achieve on stage. In fact, those who attended the album release might be the only audience who will ever actually see the music played front to back timed with the film. The band will probably never do that again, as they are already moving on to new material, and expanding into their next chapter.
Along with digital download on Bandcamp, and physical CDs available at the Record Exchange and their live performances (in a handsome black-and-white six-fold paper case designed by Russell), the entirety of "Dark Water At the Foot Of the Mountain" is streaming free on YouTube where it's tracked to the film. Primary recording took place at The Wizard Hat (Yachats, OR); secondary recordings at Das Schmidt Haus (Boise, ID); and vocal recordings at Cathedral of the Rockies (Boise, ID), where album co-producer Ethan Schmidt works sound. Rylie recalls showing up at the converted church venue Cathedral of the Rockies while their choir was still practicing and feeling self-conscious because she was wearing a panda outfit and eating hamburgers.
Much of the photography used for the CD cover is from the band's visit to the Oregon coast last year, including an unsettling image of a crab skeleton lodged among rocks. This imagery comports with their music, however, where darkness reveals and introduces beauty, and an uncomfortable sense of constriction opens out into a vast bleak terrain that hints at hope. The traction of the music is desultory, undulent, as if one has wandered to land's end to face an ocean complicated by a hallucinogenic vision. All seems to end, even as it begins ever anew. Or as poet Wallace Stevens once wrote: "Death is the mother of all beauty." There's no question that Ealdor Bealu's premiere project "Dark Water At the Foot of the Mountain" is a ravishingly beautiful accomplishment.
Having no assumptions, the band was genuinely stoked by how many people came out for the Neurolux album release concert. It was an honor for them to be on the same bill with Red Hands Black Feet and opening act Lucid Aisle (Brent Joel). Boise's Neurolux gig launched the band's northwest tour that took them to the Humble Burger in Moscow, Idaho, then to Spokane, Washington (where their gig was unfortunately canceled due to the headliner act being unable to play), then on to Seattle, and their Oregon gigs in Portland, Eugene and Bend. Russell's personal favorite was Seattle where they played on a bill with Weeed (who hail from Bainbridge Island off the coast of Seattle). Collingwood enjoyed their Eugene gig the most. They were booked into a venue that had been a sorority house in the 1920s, and a commune since the '50s with beautiful artwork all over the walls. Some Eastern Idaho dates are being blocked out for the Fall.
