Pressed And

PRESSED AND HAVE DEMANDED FROM THEMSELVES A BALANCE IN COMPOSITION AND SHARPNESS OF CRAFT THAT PAYS OFF MIGHTILY IN THEIR DEBUT FULL-LENGTH, STONE CANDLES.

North Carolinian, Mat Jones and Atlanta native, Andrew Hamlet began recording as Pressed And after meeting as students at UNC Chapel Hill. Their unique performance and recording style features Mat manipulating samples of his voice and triggering electronics while Andrew utilizes expertly processed guitar and electronics to create a sound far more intricate and intense than what you might expect from a duo.













Their first recordings as Pressed And caught the ear of fabled cassette label, Crash Symbols, who released their debut ep, Imbue Up on a limited run of tapes. The band worked with a number of burgeoning visual artists to create mini videos for each track on the ep, culminating in the site, Stadiums And Shrines posting Imbue Up - A Visual EP. The videos, full of found footage, psychedelic effects and left-field editing caught the eyes and ears of Mush Records, who re-released the EP while waiting on new material from the band.

Pressed And hit the road on early 2012 to promote the re-release, playing shows from Brooklyn down to Atlanta, up to Chicago, over to Seattle, and down through both Northern and Southern California. The 29-city tour was a huge success and led to live recordings for both Daytrotter and Terroreyes TV.

The bands second effort, Hyper Thistle EP, was a direct result of the tour. The release was meant to bridge the sound of the genre-defying debut with the more performance based techniques developed on the road that would drive their debut full-length. Having now moved from North Carolina to Brooklyn, Pressed And were ready to embark on their most ambitious effort.

2013 brought with it the completion of Pressed And's debut full-length, the fourteen track opus, Stone Candles. The album is the band's ultimate accomplishment in their drive for balance in composition. As an electronic act, Pressed And has always evoked the pastoral, but while their debut Imbue Up could hold up at an after-party for the LA set, Stone Candles unabashedly locates itself in the more generalized humidity of "the South".

The newfound southern swagger that drives Stone Candles is most explicit in the country guitar and vocal samples of "372", and more gestured at in the open guitar strumming looped in "Haus" and elsewhere on the album. Other highlights include the righteous string-work on the epic, eight-minute standout "Bored on a Lam" and the haunting experimentation of "Decision Made".

With their sonic aspirations having taken them a few too many steps past the traditional sound-associations of both guitar music and electronica, Pressed And has demanded from themselves a sharpness of craft that pays off mightily with Stone Candles.

Mush Records