A technology-forward update on the Postal Service’s remote-album formula, Eric & Magill’s 2010 debut All Those I Know was pieced together by long-distance friends Eric Osterman and Ryan Weber, former players in the indie-rock band Camden who were living in Michigan and Milwaukee, respectively. Making the most of their Wi-Fi connections, the two swapped song ideas, piecing together the album from their solo recordings and the emailed contributions of a couple dozen or so musician friends who chipped in parts wherever they could. “It was this crazy, amazing social experiment,” Osterman explains.
These days Eric & Magill is an even longer-distance project than it was back then. Osterman has landed in Brooklyn, while Weber moved to Kenya to join the Peace Corp. All those extra time zones between the two has done little to slow the project, though. “Instead of talking on the phone every day, we’re just on Instant Messenger now,” Osterman says. “Ryan is busy with the Peace Corp. during the day, but there’s not a lot of him to do there at night, so we still spend a lot of time doing this. We have everything dialed down and we have a method. In some ways, the fact that we’re not in the same room trying to practice every week probably helped our working relationship.”
This spring, the duo will share the fruits of that labor. In May, they’ll release their second full-length album, Night Singers, but first they’re teasing the album with a new EP, Two Travelers, which they released for free download on their Bandcamp page today. Two Travelers boasts a smaller guest roster than All Those I Know—the result, Osterman says, of time constraints (the duo hurried to finish it before Weber’s move)—but there are still plenty of outside fingerprints on these six tracks. Gufs drummer Scott Schwebel lent his kit to shimmery, Church-like “Take On Too Much;” He Can Jog’s Erik Schoster colored “Carried Away” with some electronic accents, and, most noticeably, Heidi Spencer contributed her indelible voice to the opener “Tangled Up In Nets.”
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You can stream the whole EP below.
