Midday Veil

Photo by Frank Correa. Click to download print-size version.

ABOUT

Emerging from the slippery, mythical darkness of the Pacific Northwest—where even the mushrooms have mushrooms growing on them—Midday Veil combines haunting vocals and cosmic synth work with driving, hypnotic rock grooves to produce music that rewards careful listening and defies easy categorization.

The band began in 2008 as a collaboration between Emily Pothast, a vocalist and songwriter from Texas who earned an MFA in visual art before becoming a full-time musician and David Golightly, an analog synth-head who was deeply influenced by courses led by Karlheinz Stockhausen during his studies in composition and electronic music in Germany. In early 2009, Midday Veil's sound was catalyzed by the addition of guitarist Timm Mason, a prolific multi-instrumentalist obsessed with modular synthesis, musique concrète and Middle Eastern guitar tones. In 2011, the band added Jayson Kochan on bass. Rhythmic duties are currently on the shoulders of Garrett Moore, who replaced original drummer Chris Pollina in 2012.

Midday Veil's 2010 debut studio album Eyes All Around garnered high praise from a handful of tastemakers, however it is the band's ecstatic improvised cassette releases Subterranean Ritual II (2011) and INTEGRATRON (2012)—recorded in an acoustically perfect wooden dome built with "extraterrestrial guidance" on a magnetic vortex in the Mojave desert—that have created the biggest ripples in the experimental underground. Produced by Seattle luminary Randall Dunn (Sunn O))), Master Musicians of Bukkake) and featuring original artwork by Robert Beatty, Midday Veil's follow-up studio LP The Current (2013) harnesses the experimental intensity of these improvised releases with a return to the arena of songcraft.

A strong live act, Midday Veil has toured the Western US regularly since 2009, notably opening for krautrock legends Faust on a Northwest mini tour in 2012. The band completed its first US tour in March-April 2012 with appearances at SXSW, 35 Denton and LA Psych Fest.

SELECTED PRESS

"Midday Veil consistently produces some of the best experimental psychedelic music I've ever heard, always bending genres and minds at the same time."

- Hammer Smashed Sound

"Midday Veil make music the way this kind of music ought to be made."

- Foxy Digitalis

"Sensual and mystical...the rhythms of a world gone completely mad for all the right reasons."

- Tiny Mix Tapes

"...possess the spirits of the greats of psychedelic rock (Ash Ra Tempel, especially)..."

- Weed Temple

"Midday Veil have the art and authenticity of good psych rock, with none of the grimy regret of that genre's gummy-headed next day awakening."

- Three Imaginary Girls

"Eyes All Around is an album of perfect balance - a meditation on life and death, light and dark, ambient, near-subliminal blankets of sound and loud, jaw-clenching power. It is an album in the truest sense: oversized, vividly illustrated and providing an anthology of distinct, yet distinctly intertwined, songs, sounds and emotions."

- Revolt of the Apes

"Eyes All Around is one of those 'take you on a journey' recordings; it's a sensational round trip that's both exceptionally harrowing and blissful, mystical and earthy, cerebral and sensual. Mind expansion rarely is this sexy."

- The Stranger