CCR131
A collaboration between Birthday Cake & Sunroom Records
Support/Download/Purchase:
centralheatexchange.bandcamp.com
People don’t talk on the phone all that much anymore. When we’re apart, we text and DM — ping ponging back and forth, sending and replying. A perfectly rendered circuit. But if you call someone, and you get their voicemail, there is no certainty that you will ever get a reply. You may go on forever, missing each other, etching thoughts and ideas into the ether—having a conversation without speaking, directly, to anybody. This kind of liminal conversation is the essence of Central Heat Exchange - a new band of close-but-distant friends.
Central Heat Exchange is the sound of four co-writers and a deep list of special features (Sun June, Lala Lala, Fran, + more) scattered by distance, time, and circumstance. Their self-titled debut — out September 10th via Birthday Cake Media/Citrus City Records/Sunroom Records — is a pastiche of dream-like memories and rich melodies, unabashedly harkening back to the sounds of early-aughts indie heroes like Stereolab, Yo La Tengo, Broken Social Scene, and Neutral Milk Hotel. Recorded in separate bedrooms across North America’s central time zone and mostly mixed together by Ben Lumsdaine (Major Murphy, Varsity, Kevin Krauter, Amy O, EZTV), the album reconstructs a sense of communal possibility during a time when the very idea of community—especially in music—was dislocated, wrenched from its foundation in venues and practice spaces and, like so much else during this pandemic, deposited online.
The members of Central Heat Exchange met at shows over the years. They were friendly but not really close friends. They didn’t live anywhere near each other and it seemed like this pattern would continue: do some shows sporadically and reconnect every few years. But in the spring of 2020, after being locked down for the better part of three months, Jake wrote and recorded a piece of a song, sent that song fragment to Santi who recorded some vocal melodies, which were then passed to Adam and Paul to thicken it up with keys, bass, and guitars.
This happened ten more times in different iterations—each track recorded remotely, at home, using whatever gear and personnel was handy. Lumsdaine took all their rough-edged ideas and stitched/mixed them together into a cohesive collection of rockers, feelers and in-betweeners. “For most of the songs,” Santi writes, “it was a refreshing experience to build songs as instrumentals first, taking a texture-forward approach to songwriting before figuring where the lyrical content would go. Each blank track file felt like a new and refreshing place to escape to creatively.”
Whether you’re looking for an anthemic driving jam to listen to on a trip, or a midtempo acoustic bop to cry yourself to sleep to, Central Heat Exchange is the batch of fuzzy indie pop we’ve all been missing in our lives for the last decade.
released September 10, 2021
Central Heat Exchange is:
Adam Soloway - vocals, guitar, banjo, percussion, keyboards & synth
Santiago Dietche - vocals, guitar, bass, drum machine, piano, keyboards & synth
Jacob Stolz - vocals, guitar, glockenspiel, drum machine, keyboards & synth
Paul Stolz - bass, guitar, saxophone, drum machine, keyboards & synth
Featuring:
Ben Lumsdaine - drums and keyboards on "Fortnight", drums on "Almost to You", "Horsey Cop", "Tomatoes (Breath of God"
Abby Black - drums on "Tulips at my Bedside" and "Directly Down"
Gilad Carroll - group vocals on "Tulips at my Bedside"
Sam Sarty - vocals on "Tulips at my Bedside", trombone on "You Showed Up"
Dave Vettraino - omnichord on "Almost to You", mixing on "Tulips at my Bedside"
Dylan Weschler - tape loops on "You Showed Up"
Annie Stolz - keyboards on "You Showed Up"
Sarah Schultz - drums on "You Showed Up" and "Dusty Glass"
Stephanie Smith - vocals on "Directly Down"
Brent Penny - synth on "Cold"
Brian Gluck - drums on “Cold”
Sam Houdek - guitar on "Cold"
Maria Jacobson - vocals on "Dusty Glass"
Zack Wiggs - pedal steel on "Dusty Glass"
Jason Tait - keyboards and vibraphone on "Drumless"
Julie Penner - violin on "Drumless"
Recorded 2020-2021
Mixing by Ben Lumsdaine
Mastering by Cory Allen
Cover painting by Nina Stolz Bellucci
Design by Clare Byrne
