Summer-FM!

Little sweetheart, we’re almost a year out from the release of Deux Anges but our friends at KFJC, WFMU, London’s Resonance FM, and any number of internet radio stations are still playing tracks from the double album, for which we’re incredibly grateful!

Also, today, Dan - who has a Sunday morning show on the aforementioned KFJC in Nor Cal played a track from Of Love and Loss. “Out”, with your soaring vocals, came in the first hour between a new band that we quite like, Memory Wire, and a longtime favorite of us both, the Cure.

Listen, little sweetheart - you’re on the radio!

UK Radio Interview

A got a chance to talk about you for some time tonight, little sweetheart, during a radio interview in the UK. 

A station there, Radio SLE, has several programs that have featured us over the last couple of years. The first of them was in collaboration a while back with the Canadian podcast, Limbocast, that did interviews with me after Deux Anges was released, broadcast the double-album in its entirety and then had us back to talk about Til Morning again last December. 

A couple other shows have picked us up, little sweetheart, and a special one, "Music in Mind", that talks with musicians and composers about their work and issues of health and well-being, asked me a couple weeks ago if they could schedule an hour long interview with me for broadcast today. SLE doesn't archive their broadcasts, so I don't have a link to a recording but I had a very wide ranging and thoughtful chat with their host Frankie Rose. 

We spoke a lot about you, of course - the soul and conscience of Bipolar Explorer, the very reason for its existence and continuation - and she opened and closed the show with songs from Sometimes in Dreams: "You Are Loved (Summer's Theme)" at the top of the hour and "Our Oneness Can Never Be Erased" at its end. 

As ever, it's all for you. Listen, little sweetheart - you're on the radio! 

With all my love forever.   

San Simeon (You Said)

Little sweetheart, our earliest champion, the great Irene Trudel, played a track off of our double-album, Deux Anges, today on her legendary show. It's always an enormous honor and all of the songs are truly prayers to you but I'm so glad she played this one - "San Simeon (You Said)" - the 3rd track on Disc Two. 

The beginnings of this record found their origin on the road trip that Sylvia and I made down Highway One in California - a trip I always wanted to make with you (even though I know you hate being in the car!). We'd flown out to see your folks and were with them before and after. Your dad let us borrow the Enclave (it's the spare car they have hanging around - what replaced the beloved Rendezvous) and we headed down the coast for a five day trip down to my birthplace in Santa Barbara and back on the coastal route, stopping at a few of the Missions along the way. I wrote about it (and Sylvia posted it) on the special mini site about Deux Anges. 

All along the way on the overnights, I played my Westerberg electric (the one I kept at your apartment in the Inner Sunset) through a cheap echo pedal and a 9V mini Marshall amp. I'd record via voice memo and the first three of the 30 songs on Deux Anges were birthed that way. 

All them them - Santa Barbara, Mission Street (Carmel) and San Simeon - retained their titles for their geographical origin. All began as instrumentals and "Santa Barbara" remained one. "San Simeon" was the last to have a vocal. Indeed, I put the vocal on and later had to learn how to play and sing it simultaneously(!). It's incredibly prayerful when I do, now. 

The lyrics are very minimal but perfect somehow in evoking we three - you, Sylvia and I. I know how you are with me. You were that night when I played the lick in our hotel room. You were when these words found me. You are even now. 

With all my love forever.

Fredric Westin's "Lärjungarna på väg till Emaus"

Little sweetheart, I'm often on the prowl for artwork both for the album covers and their booklets. We've done booklets now for three of the nine albums. The one for Deux Anges was 48 pages (!) and a collection of black and white photos nearly as old as the medium itself, all taken at the turn of the 19th-into-20th century in pastoral Middle England. 

I saw something yesterday, also in the public domain, that very much intrigued me. I don't know if we'll use it somewhere or not but it's quite lovely. 

It's detail from Fredric Westin's "Lärjungarna på väg till Emaus" and it's here below. The larger work is darker, a night scene of shepherds. This is at the top of the painting, the light breaking through the night and an angel on watch. 

My thoughts flew to you immediately. How you brought such light and love into my own life! 

With all my love forever. 

 

Words from London

Little sweetheart, Deux Anges was given the most lovely review recently in the UK’s rather legendary music zine, “The Sound Projector”. I think I forgot to mention it here. 

Written by its editor and founder, Ed Pinsent, it's very thoughtful and fulsome in its praise but I think what I liked most about it was how he recognized you, little sweetheart, as the very center and soul of the band, saying: "the (absent) main member of the band is Summer Serafin. This was Michael’s partner who died nine years ago, and since then it’s been Michael’s mission to keep the project (and her memory) alive, mainly by drawing on his personal archive of recordings of Summer’s vocal tracks..."

A further excerpt is below. As ever, little sweetheart, it’s all for you. With all my love forever.

"The group continue to deliver their unique brand of very understated guitar-pop with subdued vocals, hazy ambient melodies, spoken (or rather whispered) word recits, instrumentals - some enhanced with field recordings. All of 'Deux Anges' is steeped in a very wistful melancholy, a poignant longing. Lyrics emerge as a form of prayer and we continue to find allusions to the afterlife, heaven, angels, mortality, ghosts, miracles… and compassion, empathy, and hope. At two CDs and three hours, there’s also a lot of it to listen to, but BPX never outstay their welcome with their unassuming tone and the gentle, lulling pull of their mesmerizing songs."
-The Sound Projector (UK), Ed Pinsent, Editor

More "Best of 2020"

Little sweetheart, yesterday we were back on the great Irene Trudel’s show on WFMU. 

Irene was one of our earliest champions, the first DJ to play tracks from “Of Love and Lost” and then really taking up the banner with BPXmas and Angels, onward. 

Today was her Best of 2020 show. She played “A Place” - the lead off track from disc two of Deux Anges and had lovely things to say about it after. Irene’s including the album in her Best Of makes this the fourth year end list Deux Anges has made. Sylvia designed this little graphic with the info. 

Congrats, little sweetheart! Love you forever. 

This Christmastide

This Christmastide has been so different than those of year’s past, little sweetheart. I’ve been on my own. Usually, I’m just getting back from California after seeing your folks this time of year. 

It’s been difficult and sad and I hadn’t even been over to the little rectory at Sacred Heart to bring Christmas cookies to Sister Catherine and rest of The Order. Not that I didn’t want to, but because of the whole pandemic thing I thought it might not be a good idea to bring something I baked - I didn’t want them to worry. But I also usually bring them a copy of a new album after we release it and I hadn’t done that yet. 

So I walked over with a Christmas card and a copy of Deux Anges and rang the bell. Sister Catherine wasn’t there but two of the other sisters talked to me for a while. I gave them the little package and told them about you. They said they’d give the package to Sister Catherine and before I left we stood in the doorway and we said a little prayer. 

Please be with me today, little sweetheart. I’m missing you so very much. With all my love forever.

Christmas Morning

It’s Christmas Day, little sweetheart. It started early, with a London radio broadcast at 8am our time here in NYC. We were back on Max Reinhardt’s show on Soho Radio. He played “Snowfall” from Deux Anges and had such wonderful things to say about it, addressing all three of us that I have to share it here for you now:

"Well, that's the first sign of snowfall this year, anyway. That was Bipolar Explorer from their album Deux Anges and it's on Slugg Records. And, um, I have to say - hi, there, Summer & Sylvia & Michael, if you're all listening. And you're all in very different places and very different dimensions, I know, but I just have to say, the more you listen to the album, the double-album, the better it gets! And it's all so different! That one ("Snowfall") is, uh, somehow or other, somewhere between Sonic Youth and "The Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus" ! But, anyway, very fine!

Isn’t that just terribly nice, little sweetheart? Merry Christmas, my gorgeous girl. Listen, you’re on the radio!

Best Albums of 2020

Remember, little sweetheart, I was just telling you about all the wonderful, lovely airplay Deux Anges has been getting? Well, last weekend something extraordinary happened... 

Max Reinhardt - the legendary longtime host of BBC Radio 3’s great Late Junction - featured us on his show on London’s Soho Radio. And not just any show - his Best of 2020. And not just on the three hour show - he closed the show with us! “Infinity Hall” (which seems to kinda becoming the single) ended the program - his Best Releases of the Year - and he introduced us with these words: 

"And... Bipolar Explorer. Well... there is hauntology at work. Hauntology right in the center of their work."

From your days at Oxford, little sweetheart, to my days working in London as a writer, to our times, finally, together there, I think it would be hard to find two more Anglophile Americans than you & I, don't you? And an not unsubstantial part of that was listening, on both sides of the Atlantic, to Max - and John Peel and Verity Sharp - on BBC. Pretty heady stuff for us, isn't it little sweetheart? 

Listen, you're on the radio!

Across The Airwaves

Little sweetheart, Deux Anges has been getting so much nice radio play it’s almost hard to even remember it all! 

KFJC has been playing tracks from the album across about a dozen shows and nearly every day! The wonderful post-rock show in The Netherland’s -DeMist - has had us on three different weeks. Several shows on London’s Resonance FM, including a brand new one we really like, Fog Cast - which is a weekly hour of ambient and dark ambient music devoted nearly half the show to the album, playing 5 tracks, ending with your soaring vocals fading out into the next show. Our beloved hometown WFMU, too, has played us numerous different programs and several online stations from Canada to Germany to the UK have followed suit. 

We’re so delighted and grateful. Listen little sweetheart, you’re on the radio!

Coming Soon...

Little sweetheart, we've been getting some wonderful airplay and advance reviews for the new album, Deux Anges, ahead of its release on your birthday next month. 

KFJC did a three hour special about the band last month, previewing ten of the 30 tracks in the third hour and radio from near and far - WFMU, The Netherland's DeMist, Germany's TSFC, and others have been featuring and debuting others. 

Some very kind words have found print also, little sweetheart, from The Wire Magazine's Dave Mandl and France's Punktum, who wrote, in part:

“The announcement of a new Bipolar Explorer album is always, to us, a surprise as formidable as it is pleasant. Indeed, this project, which we’ve been loving for several years now, has never tried to do the same work twice, slow rock movements on which Summer, Sylvia and Michael lay their spontaneous inspirations. Drawing ideas from the realm of dreams, as well as the deeper, more refined confrontation with reality, through a softness full of wisdom and contemplation, Bipolar Explorer is a call for renaissance, a refusal of passivity, without any futile anger. An introduction to the inner and spiritual dream, the first excerpt, ”Santa Barbara”, with its hypersensitive contours, goes beyond our hopes and dreams, while found sounds from an indescribable place and the musicians’, pure and unique, meet. DEUX ANGES is released on November 13th.” 

All of it, as ever, for you. With all my love forever. 

More Radio Days

I almost forgot to mention, little sweetheart, that you've been on the radio twice in the last couple of days! 

As we're ramping up to the release of the new album, our 9th, Deux Anges, on your birthday, it's nice to report! 

Yesterday, WFMU, reached back to 2012's double-album Of Love and Loss, to play "Out", with your soaring vocals weaving in and out and floating above my own. 

And on Saturday morning 'FMU's Jefferey Davison played our most recent single "eleven:eleven" - the track I composed and we recorded for the UK's Dark Outside last April. Again, your vocals soaring above the bed of experimental dreampop sounds, Jeffrey had the kindest words, saying: 

"A long piece, "eleven:eleven", on Slugg Records, from Bipolar Explorer. I’ve played them before. Their stuff is really beautiful and I have to say this might be definitely maybe one of the more beautiful things I’ve heard from them – which is saying something. Really gorgeous piece.” 

As ever, little sweetheart - it's all for you! With all my love forever.