You can see why John Harrison and Ben Felton were drawn together: They're both seasoned in the local guitar-rock scene, and they've both been probing more abstract realms in their recent solo work.
After a long stint fronting Chapel Hill indie-rock torchbearers North Elementary, Harrison is cultivating gentle pastoral psychedelia as jphono1, while Felton has followed his time in the dearly departed Durham dance-punk band Jett Rink by building ambient guitar edifices as Blood Revenge.
Their new duo project, Tacoma Park, combines their abstract impulses in a style you might call homespun monumental, with heavily processed guitars and richly textured synths combining into a Southeastern American take on a certain German tradition of droning, pulsating, landscape-traveling electronic music. Live, the duo augments the music with videos of the images—forests and fields, highways and runways—that it so readily suggests.
Tacoma Park releases its debut record, Floating Point for High Fives, via Potluck Foundation on Wednesday, February 5, with a release show to follow at The Cave on Friday, February 7. We'll have a review on Wednesday. In the meantime, here's the premiere of "There Are Three Ones," which sounds like mountain giants playing cellos and patiently builds toward one delicate change, like a song growing inside a song:
