Sunshine Baby by HITS

HITS is a drum-centric trio hailing from Portland, OR, including drummers Lisa Schonberg and Heather Treadway, two thirds of the brilliant Explode Into Colors, alongside multi-instrumentalist Allan Wilson, a founding member of !!! (chk chk chk). Leaping at the chance to explore their disciplines together, the three created HITS for a month-long residency at artist Andrea Zittel’s A-Z West compound in the rocky hills of Joshua Tree. To develop their compositions for performance, the band employed a multi-channel speaker array designed by Wilson, and donned gowns crafted by Treadway with dyes inspired by desert soils and plants.

'Sunshine Baby,' their first recorded offering, features six songs that highlight the trio's engrossing balance between organic and synthetic elements, all between kaleidoscopic live drums and percussion. The intensity and variety of sounds reflect the character of the desert in which it was made: stark, strong rhythms and kosmische tone washes echo the dry, windy landscape of the California desert. Ephemeral voices and samples appear here and there, rounding out a range of affected audio, ear-catching vocal turns, and trance.

"HITS make music that is as visceral as it is visual..." -Impose Magazine

"You reach a point where the music becomes absolutely mesmerizing in its abstract emotional impact -- the beats coil around your brain, refusing to budge, and place you in the odd position of having to make your way through a landscape of ruined percussion in order to find the road back home." -Nooga

"...as meditative and hypnotic as anything you’d expect to grow out of so much time spent banging on drums, likely around campfires, in the middle of the California desert… which is certainly not to say that the record sounds like a hippie free-form jam out, either. The project’s sound design, initially designed to be performed in a multi-channel environment, is much more deliberate and sculpted -- but still manages to encourage the same kind of loose-limbed nature worship any hippie jam out would be on board with." -Redefine Magazine

"...creates so much with seemingly so little . . . something of legend." -Raised By Gypsies

Art by Jason Leonard
Layout by Liz Pavlovic
http://lizpavlovic.com/

Tracklist

1.	Know What I Mean	5:46

2.	Big Metal	3:42

3.	Tin Pan Allan	3:20

4.	Boulders	5:58

5.	Fuck the 7-11/U-Licious	4:26

6.	Vons Tundra	4:51

Credits

released May 26, 2015

License

CC BY-NC 3.0. See the Creative Commons website for details.