What on earth is Île de Rêve?
Well, Île de Rêve is a ‘dream island’, our first LP. Something that has been long in the making. In fact, it was exactly ten years ago (in 2009) that I headed over to Martin’s house, armed with a copy of Judith Schalansky’s Atlas of Remote Islands and a few scruffily hand-written pages of notes on some of the stories contained within I thought were interesting.
We poured over the stories and set about creating musical accompaniments to them, messing around with guitar pedals and a tape recorder from the attic - bits of hardware we now take for granted but started taking seriously for the first time.
Those early demos never saw the light of day, but in some ways, Private Agenda was born of those sessions, although it didn’t exist in name till years later.
Once we started talking to Lo Recordings about an album, we dipped back into our old notes and old demos for inspiration. Île de Rêve seemed to capture perfectly the conceptual and musical world we wanted to create together.
As much as islands are places were born and raised, conditioning our world-views, narrowing them and expanding them at times, they’re also a figment of our imaginations and ideal places for a great story. Perhaps that’s why the island trope has been such an enduring theme in literature and the arts.
Now, island stories act as artistic inspiration for our latest project. Collectively, nine surreal, downtempo sketches.
So there you have it, futures past.