Band: Color Film
Album: Living Arrangements
VÖ: 16.06.2017
Label: Epitaph / Indigo
Website: https://www.facebook.com/colorfilmmusic/
The medium of color film may be an industry standard these days but it wasn't so long ago that full-color moving images were being pioneered only by tenacious experimenters who built their own equipment in a quest to capture something they could only visualize in their mind's eye. For that reason it should come as no surprise that the band Color Film sees the duo of Daryl Palumbo and Richard Penzone recontextualizing their shared set of influences into a wholly new sonic amalgam that's unmistakably familiar yet simultaneously shimmers in a way you've never heard before. It's not a reinvention so much as it is a brave progression for this twosome whose collective musical resume includes a myriad of culture-driving projects that have created waves in the music scene.
The story of Color Film began six years ago when Palumbo and Penzone united for some scheduled live dates. "In the process we started playing around we came up with a million weird ideas that both of us had and instantly started working on music that we wanted to record,” Palumbo explains. "The two of us probably share more interests than anyone else I've ever met in my life and there are all these wild, arty records that we both love so it only made sense for us to sit down and try to channel that into something new." What the duo didn't expect was how quickly the music would flow out of them and during their first month of non-stop hanging out and practicing they ended up writing four albums worth of material. In fact the most difficult part of the of putting together Living Arrangements was deciding which tracks made the cut.
"From the start we knew we wanted to do everything ourselves," Penzone says, looking back at the chunks of time the duo spent in Long Island writing the bones for these songs. "We were just trying to write as much material as possible because it was clear that we were capturing something that doesn't come along more than once in a lifetime." The duo are the first to admit that the influences and music on Living Arrangements may be less straight-forward than their previous projects but when you consider what informed the album, it makes perfect sense. "We were both representing when artists we loved were coming into their own a little bit and exploring ideas in a sophisticated, sexy way," Palumbo says. Correspondingly the touchstones for these songs may not be instantly identifiable, but that's sort of the point.
From “Restless Summer” to “We'd Kill Each Other” and “Springtime Of Our Love,” Living Arrangements displays the many sonic sides of Color Film's artistic palette and is undeniably the most undiluted form self-expression we've seen from either member to date. “The album definitely is a journey in the sense that it starts big,” Palumbo explains. “There's the pop thing, a lot of synthesizer sounds, sampled instruments and smooth bass and I feel so lucky that we're in a place where we can write this type of music,” he continues. “The two of us will listen to some of these songs we wrote and get introspective and I'll admit it, it feels awesome.”
