Atom Brigade feat. Rupert Lally & The Home Current - Atom Brigade (2023)

Atom Brigade is the debut album from an online 'super group' consisting of Martin Jensen (aka The Home Current), Rupert Lally, Amanda Jay (aka Star Madman) & Oliver Cherer (aka Gilroy Mere, Dollboy & many more).

Jensen reached out to Lally in 2020, sketching out the idea to workshop some new material via long distance file sharing (Jensen and Lally are based in Luxembourg & Switzerland respectively). Work began In earnest the following year, as musical arrangements began to be fleshed out, gradually finding coherent shape through a process of collaborative osmosis.

Reflecting on their process, Lally recalls the collective to and fro:
"Martin sent over a bunch of ideas, which generally included a beat, a bass line, and maybe some sort of melodic idea. I then overdubbed guitars and synths... Neither of us told the other what sort of things to play or what type of sounds to use.
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Jensen adds, "It was a very straightforward, natural and intuitive exercise. In addition, Rupert sent a couple of unfinished tracks for me to add to, and everything eventually went into the pot of music we stirred up."

At an advanced stage, it became clear that some tracks would benefit from vocal treatment to round things off. With previous experience of their work, Jensen recommended UK based Oliver Cherer & US solo-artist Amanda Jay. This proved to be an inspired move, adding the final flourishes to a remarkable album.

Stepping back from the intricate stages of such a multi-layered process, spanning both continents and time, it is striking how these interactions evolved into such a musically coherent and thematically complete creation. There is a warm sense of head nodding familiarity throughout, invoking the spirit of some forgotten record box classic brought back to the future.