Magic Hour

go to magic hour’s myspace page

You can purchase the album or buy MP3 tracks from the wonderful Vitamin Music

Magichour Released 9 February, 2010 CDs and high quality MP3’s available now from VITAMIN RECORDS

Ian Houston Shadwell’s studio is nothing more than a couple of computers, half a dozen guitars a few old microphones and a half strung sitar as well as various shakers, tambourines and bamboo flutes scattered across the expanse of his old op shop shabby desk.  He sits in a tattered, vintage deco apartment that overlooks the coastal nooks of Sydney’s Tamarama beach.  The wind howls off the ocean and rattles against the windows. 

It is here that Ian and Gemma have spent the last year and a half in fevered bursts between other projects putting together the new Magichour album.

This was an album that was made slowly. Carved from an excess of ideas, Magichour was nurtured, found, almost by accident in the details of their desire. Songs were remembered as much as written.  A kind of nostalgia rendered with the technologies of a future beauty.

Houston Shadwell’s fascination with detail and process had him slaving over waveform graphics deep into the night, trying to find that ideal guitar note, or vocal phrase.  

Magichour is an album infused with all of the deep folk pop sensibilties that structured their last work, Sydney acoustic ensemble Cactus Child, but with a new sense of space and atmospherics.  

Think Julee Cruise meets Feist says hello to Aimee Mann.  Gemma’s magical vocals have that same enduring quality.  A haunting lustre that resonates on the knife edge of beauty.