Spacebomb House Band Announces Anthology Series

Often described as Richmond’s own version of the Stax Records house band, the Spacebomb House Band announced a new anthology series today called Library Music, which starts with a current release of instrumentals, “Library Music I: No Space High Enough.”

A press release from the Spacebomb label noted this is a “growing archive of instrumentals, interstitial music and spiritual sound effects collected in Richmond, Va. Each release is intended for practical use and distributed as supplementary material for the good times, the bad times, and the no times.”

The release utilizes longstanding members of the Symphony, jazz scene and gospel community. Four steady Spacebomb contributors are featured, according to the release: “Matthew E. White the visionary pragmatist, Trey Pollard the pragmatic visionary, Cameron Ralston the navigator of spirits & Pinson Chanselle the spirited navigator– [They] focus their output in a flowing mix of styles and scenes, discrete soundtracks saturated with the soul of an imaginary cinema. Operating through the blurred roles of producer, composer, player, arranger, and dub engineer, these four interlocking personalities combine to form a remarkably singular voice.”

“We wanted to try a new approach of creating music together as a team,” Chanselle tells Style. “We wanted to work with loop based forms, explore the conversation between traditional and synthetic instruments and to experiment with more radical treatments in the post production process.”

Pollard adds: “We’ve been going into the studio regularly to record music for the library. We’ve been using the term ‘sketchbook’ a bunch to describe the process. Trying to just get in, explore some aspect of the process and get out.”

“The palette of sounds we’re using is pretty similar to what we have historically used on records. Drums, bass, drum machines, guitars, keyboards, strings, horns, vocal group, weird delays and the like. Maybe a few more keyboards than we often use. We don’t need to follow any traditional song forms at all, so there’s definitely some weirder moments, sonically than we might get to on a record. There’s some groovy stuff at one end and then some soundscape pieces at the other.”

Spacebomb is giving away cassettes (only 100 were made) of the album at Steady Sounds and Addison’s Handmade and Vintage, but if you can’t make it there, you can find the release here. Also find the cassette for $8 here.

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