Peals, the duo of two pillars of the Baltimore music scene William Cashion (Future Islands) and Bruce Willen (Double Dagger) has announced the release of two albums, The Compound 76 on limited LP and Le Pantoum 46 on digital, both out July 31st. Along with the news of the album releases, the duo have shared The Compound 76 single “Essential Attitudes,” captured in crystalline detail at Baltimore art collective space The Compound by engineer Craig Bowen (Lungfish, Animal Collective, Dan Deacon). The piece is emblematic of the duo’s ability to harness warped, twinkling textures into melodic starlight, which they expand and collapse beneath a steady pulse.
In an excerpt of his liner notes on the album, writer Grayson Haver Currin gives the duo their flowers and context for the duo’s place in Baltimore music, as well as artists on the forefront of the burgeoning ambient sound of the 2010s:
“Four years near the beginning of the last decade, William Cashion and Bruce Willen created quietly radiant instrumental music from two tessellated guitars, a few modest synths, and a slew of percussive and noisy toys, like walkie-talkies or the things that gave the pair their handle, bells. This 2016 live recording is taken from the band’s next-to-last show, at least for now, cut in an artist-run space called The Compound in their hometown of Baltimore. Peals is the project of two bassists known best for their other livewire and loud Baltimore bands: Future Islands for Cashion, Double Dagger for Willen. Technically, Double Dagger—an absolutely electrifying post-punk trio—had reached its end just as Cashion and Willen began talking about trying to make music together, but that context never really mattered.
“Peals emerged at an inconvenient moment for their sort of instrumental wonder. The noisy international explorations of great acts like Yellow Swans, Growing, and Fuck Buttons (all duos, mind you) had mostly subsided before Peals played their first show in April 2012. And the current bloom in New Age and ambient music was very much still germinating, those terms still catching substantial side-eye from arbiters of acceptability. That was steadily changing, however, as Peals offered this set in September 2016, with the United States unknowingly at the edge of successive upheavals that would increasingly make such sounds feel like requisite medicine.
“Writing to you from 2026, then, this recording does not feel at all out-of-time, like some overlooked gem that was simply swallowed by its moment. It sounds relevant, welcoming, welcome. These 38 seamless minutes have clear predecessors: Manuel Göttsching’s E2-E4, Cluster and Eno’s Cologne dalliances, the way Midwest Emo could sound smarter than its lyrics read. I hear bits of old spirituals and Appalachian banjo music, too, nested inside the guitars. But the way Cashion and Willen stitched it all together ignored any rules of what this music was supposed to be, so that very gentle passages abutted joyously jarring ones, so that the saxophone line that unexpectedly offers the denouement here feels as though it were birthed by a symphony of chattering guitars. It’s a sound meant for you to inhabit, to take a walk around, to notice.
“For either their first or second show, Cashion and Willen brought along a table lamp—the kind of old-fashioned thing you’d find in a thrift store, with a bulbous brass base and a thick shade that seemed much too big. They toted it to every subsequent gig, placing it between them on a table or the floor. It made the whole thing feel homey, as if they’d invited you into their living room to relax and listen, to sit still in some different space for a spell and walk away new. When Peals started, their Baltimore scene was known for paroxysms and energy—Dan Deacon, Ponytail, Ecstatic Sunshine, Future Islands, Double Dagger, and on and on. This was a calming project, a comedown for band and audience alike. The world hasn’t slowed or softened in the last decade. And Peals, heard here just before what we can hope is only a decade-long pause, still offers another option, a way out, an antidote.”
