At Dusk - Bio

It is a lucky thing to get to make music with your best friends -- friends you've known since childhood, with whom you share a vocabulary, a history, and the knowledge of how best to amuse, confuse, annoy and inspire one another. We three fellows in At Dusk are lucky in just such a way, and we want you to hear it.

We met in middle school in Los Angeles and discovered music together, beginning to play as a band only after heading off to different colleges and being geographically separated for the first time. We played over vacations that brought us from opposite coasts back to our birthtown, and in the meantime sent one another tapes of musical ideas we had to work on through the mail. Upon graduation in 2002, we decided to convene where some of us already were -- the musician's Mecca of Portland, OR. The past four years have been an exciting and productive time. We have played shows around the country, helped found and manage the local PDX Pop Now! music non-profit, and recorded a handful of records. Which brings us to now.

The third album by At Dusk, entitled "You Can Know Danger", is the kind of record that only a band that has been playing and living together for quite some time could make. We wrote and recorded these songs after our first cross-country tour, a baptism by fire that left us a stronger, tighter, more confident musical unit. All of the aspects of our music that make it distinctly ours came into relief -- dueling, off-kilter guitars; multiple vocal melodies falling into each other; complex, battering-ram drums. We took our sometimes conflicting interests in non-rock musical styles and adapted them to what we did naturally, yielding phasing, polyrhythmic relationships between instruments lifted from contemporary classical music, as well as non-Western musical traditions we love but don't really understand. We took our time. We wrote and rewrote. And in the Winter of 2006 we entered Miracle Lake Studio with Chris Anderson and Skyler Norwood (talkdemonic, Point Juncture, WA) and tried to get the most accurate representation we could of what we sound like live, pushing rather than obscuring our idiosyncrasies. We ended up with a record we are tremendously proud of that serves, we hope, as something of a dictionary and grammar of our private language.