It was winter in Manhattan. The streets were frozen and still the band rode bicycles to the Power Station on 53rd and back to Brooklyn for three weeks. Three weeks that would mark the birth of Double Infinity - the album that constitutes a grand departure for Big Thief. An ultramodern community of musicians gathered in the warm wooden room where Bruce once stood. They all tracked together – simultaneously – improvising arrangements and making collective discoveries.
Laraaji created drones with zither and an iPad and sang intuitive vocal melodies. Joshua Crumbly played bass; Mikey Buishas made live tape loops and played keys; Mikel Patrick Avery, Jon Nellen, and Caleb Michel played percussion; Adam Brisbin played guitar; and Hannah Cohen, Alena Spanger and June McDoom sang background vocals. Along with core members Adrianne, Buck, and James, the group played for nine hours a day. Double Infinity is the archive of this play. It could only have been produced, engineered, and mixed by longtime Big Thief collaborator Dom Monks.
“Double Infinity,” reaches into the idea of inner and outer worlds, and the body as the bridge. It speaks to the purgatory created by the human brain, always looking to the past or future, between the things we’ve lost and the things we want, between desire and regret. “Beauty speak to me, let me know you, let me see myself inside your mystery, through the crystal cage of aging.” It calls for true beauty to speak, not fabricated, conditioned ideas of beauty. At the bridge between “what is forming” and “what is fading”, between “losing and of gaining”, “mourning and celebrating”, perhaps there is solace in “the eye behind the essence, still, unmovable”, that which is unchanging”, outside of time. Is it love?
