Chelan is the recording project of Jennifer Grady & Justin Hosford who have been making music together for over 10 years since meeting in their native Olympia, Wa. Their former project, The Waxfire, broke up in 2007 so both could move to California to pursue other avenues of creative output. Grady moved to San Francisco & currently plays with Adam Stephens of Two Gallants for his solo project & with Emily Jane White’s band while also working on her own recordings. Hosford moved to Los Angeles to work on film music. The two decided to commit some new songs & ideas to tape & after several short plane rides & some file sharing, they are pleased to release Summer Machines on Los Angeles’ Origami Records.

Summer Machines expands on a lot of the ideals present in The Waxfire’s sound that Willamette Week described as a “heavy and alluring form of modern-day chamber music”. Combining Grady’s folk roots with Hosfords more rock leaning influences, the album translates both of those elements into acoustic based compositions that weave into vast electronic dreamscapes. The album was mixed and mastered by Hosford with the exception of opening track “No Better Than We” which was mixed by Lukas Burton (Dido, Paul McCartney).

To record & write the album, Hosford met with Grady on about 10 different occasions & would have her sing vocals to his songs that he would later re-work & tinker with in Los Angeles, “Some of the songs are completely different from what she originally sang to” he explains.
His day job in film music composition found him trying to match the emotic tension & dreamlike quality of Grady’s vocals with instrumentation that would complement it. While the band has no plans to tour or do shows at any point they found a common friend in Neil Scheld at Origami Records who quickly fell in love the recordings Hosford had shown him and offered to release the album. Spanning 9 tracks, Summer Machines marries vocal stylings comparable to Portishead with a more indie oriented electronic backing close to The Album Leaf or Talkdemonic. Summer Machines is available digitally only on iTunes.

“No Better Than We” | download

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“Warmth” | download

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Myspace | Buy