GEORGE - Shorts EP (OOYH 018.1) OUT NOW!

We have a very fun surprise drop today, a new EP from GEORGE (John Hollenbeck, Aurora Nealand, Chiquita Magic, and Anna Webber) called Shorts (OOYH 018.1). Shorts is four improvised pieces, recorded at the same time as Letters to George (OOYH 018, streaming everywhere as of today) that Hollenbeck later went back to and cut up, edited, and re-arranged into totally new pieces. It’s a super fun listen, and trust us there is no such thing as too much GEORGE in this world. Below the link is some info about the EP in Hollenbeck’s own words. Enjoy!

During the first recording session for the album that became Letters to George, we decided to record five improvisations just for fun. We had never done this before, having started our work as a band by rehearsing my compositions only a few days earlier. (I also decided to drink a can of Heineken – which I would estimate was only the fourth time I had done that, but that is another story!)

I forgot about these recordings for a while, but recently I was missing GEORGE so I took a listen to them. While the improvisations were ok in my opinion, it was far more fun to listen to the individual stems, i.e. the individual instrumental tracks, which was possible in this case because we were all isolated in the recording studio. As I became particularly attracted to certain parts of the stems, I started to reconfigure and combine them outside of the original improvisations. I felt like I was composing, but using the fragments of our five improvisations as raw material, something I had never done before! It was exciting to hear newly formulated GEORGE pieces and fascinating because it allowed me to imagine new ways our improvisations/band could sound in the future!

I hope you enjoy these! I enjoyed putting them together! And thanks to Aurora, Anna and Chiquita Magic for letting me take their raw improvisations so I could explore new territories!

– John Hollenbeck