Exhalation Sessions by Sound People

Exhalation Sessions is the work of Portland musicians Paul Dickow (Strategy, Wild Card) and Jesse Munro Johnson (Gulls, Elite Beat). Their first album together as Sound People since 2012 is joyful, loose, dubby, psychedelic and straight out of the proverbial Cascadian basement. Building and releasing tension effortlessly through each of the first five tracks, it comes down at the end with the cosmic and gorgeous 'Hematite', a beatless landscape that could drift on forever. This is music that is deeply rooted in place, evoking a rain-soaked forest carpeted with sword ferns, an illegal dance party at 4am, or the layer of ancient basalt that underlies our city. Punctuated by trumpet and with heady rhythms to spare, Exhalation Sessions vibrates like two friends capturing lightning in a bottle.

"Exhalation Sessions was conceived after a long period of meditation and re-centering around our music. We accumulated an almost overwhelming variety of intricate, detailed jam sessions that demanded years of close listening before we began to edit the mesmerizing but puzzling messes we'd made. What we discovered in the process of selecting, editing, dubbing, overdubbing, and over-over-dubbing was how consistent we remained together even as elements of surprise continually interjected into the musical dialogue. And, that this shared sonic language was grounded in friendship and a shared comfort with pursuing sound and not needing labels for it. In the years of accumulating the source material for this collection, Jesse honed his craft as a mastering engineer, and the process of finalizing the music felt like an extension of the jam sessions as we discovered ways to illuminate the hidden occurrences and subtleties within." – Paul and Jesse

Jesse Johnson and Paul Dickow, collectively as Sound People, have been gradually but steadily sharing a vivid, curious sound world since 2008. Their exploratory, painterly creations weave syncopated rhythms with the sprays of dubbed out ambient sound. Surfacing selectively to share their work publically, the duo has maintaained a consistent shared sonic dialect from their earliest work, to 2011's Teatime (Under The Spire), and 2012's Reson8 (Boomarm Nation). The pieces on Exhalation Sessions have baked longer, the fruitful results of re-works and re-edits of hours of extended basement improv sessions. Exhalation Sessions, though curated through a process of postproduction, reveals Sound People's playful, live and realtime musical conversations as something more akin to a band than a programming endeavor. Though some may know them from their diverse other projects like Gulls, Strategy, Elite Beat, and Wild Card, Sound People remains a distinct, long-running project with its own strangely-evolved musical dialect.

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