Anybody who followed Milwaukee's experimental electronic music scene around the '00s and early '10s probably has fuzzy but fond memories of Cedar AV, a trio made up of three of the city's most expressive electronic musicians: Nate Zabriskie, Erik Schoster (HeCanJog) and Nick Sanborn (Made of Oak). While the trio performed and recorded together, they never actually got around to releasing something, and when Sanborn moved away from Milwaukee and found big success with Sylvan Esso, many (including me) just assumed that was the end of the project. I underestimated them, though. Cedar AV have been recording since 2002, and it takes more than a little distance to kill off a project with that kind of history, especially one that's never been afraid to go dormant for a while.
Next month Full Spectrum Records will release Cedar AV's first record, Nin-o-Van, which the band recorded four years ago on Zabriskie's family property near Long Lake in rural Wisconsin. "We took the h4n on hikes and spotted some falcons, shot fireworks off at night on the dock and watched an episode of 'Louie' with homemade salsa," Schoster writes in a press release. "Out of that week in the woods somehow came our first proper record as Cedar AV after having formed the group years before in 2002—just as our various high school bands were dissolving and friends moved away for school."
Ahead of the album release, you can stream the track "Pike," which sounds very much like the product of the environment it was recorded in. It's a leisurely, twinkling, daydream of a song, punctuated with hits of Sanborn's guitar. It's not easy to make electronic music that sounds this rural, this naturalistic, but they've pulled it off with this one.
Stream it below.
