Night Heron and Sun Atoms with Lowland Painters

Night Heron
The record is called “Instructions for Night.” And by the end of the first track on Night Heron’s debut, the listener knows who these instructions are for. They’re for those of us awake against our will: tossing in bed after a terrible fight, pacing the hallways of new parenthood, stricken with fear of unemployment or a bad test result. These instructions are for a person (or in the case of 2020, perhaps an entire population), so dislocated by circumstance they no longer make a meaningful distinction between night and day. There is only more or less light.

But what, exactly, are the instructions? They are whispery, and multiple, and mainly tell us what not to do. “Stop crying / Go back to sleep” they tell us. (Sleeping Boy). They remind us that “martyrdom's been done before” (Dreamz). And lest we be tempted to seek solace in a device: we gaze into “1000 mirrors” but there is only “one reflection.” And then, with soft insistence: “No one is looking at you / No one is looking at you. / No one is looking at you.”

“Writing about music” Martin Mull observed, “is like dancing about architecture.” And so the writer tends to default to biography or anecdote. Most artists I know feel that biographical trivia cheapens their work. As for Cam Spies, he’d prefer to minimize the fact that Coronavirus affected the way these songs were recorded. And though he’s tentatively okay with my telling you about the personal events that shaped the record--the birth of a child, the unraveling of a relationship, quarantine—he can’t imagine that anyone would care. What does any of it have to do with the music?



Sun Atoms
Peter Holmström of The Dandy Warhols and Pete International Airport produced and plays bass in this buzzing Portland, Oregon supergroup fronted by Jsun Atoms (The Upsidedown, Daydream Machine, Pete International Airport) along with other Northwest luminaries June Kang, Mars de Ponte, Los Angeles drummer Eric Rubalcava and Boise transplant Derek Spencer Longoria Gomez.

Sun Atoms bends and blends song to song through luminary influences Leonard Cohen, The Cure, Moon Duo and Nick Cave in a resulting amalgamation that combines psychedelic, dark wave and post modern-pop.