Secretly Canadian have announced that Exitmusic will issue their debut EP ‘From Silence’ exclusively through independent record stores on October 3, with a full retail release scheduled for November 7.
Church and Palladino started writing together several years ago, when Church moved to New York following a year teaching English in Taiwan and India. “We had a funny dynamic musically, at first,” says Church, who grew up in Winnipeg. “I was listening to things that had elements sonically of what we’re doing now — Radiohead’s Kid A, that second Sigur Ros album, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Warp Records electronic stuff. But all I had to work with at the time was an acoustic guitar. Meanwhile, Aleksa was recording all these really interesting, odd arrangements on her four-track that would be about a minute long and only have one movement in them, and it sounded more like what I was into than what I was doing.”
Palladino, a New York native, had been writing and recording her own songs since she was in her early teens. She grew up in an artistic family; her grandparents are both painters and her mother is an opera singer. Aleksa got her first guitar at age 12 and played it constantly. “When I got the four-track, I got really into layering sounds and playing with what, to me, were shapes. They were music, but they were shapes and angles. I was just committed to sketching, almost. I still wonder if I hadn’t started recording with Devon, if I ever would have finished a song.” The pair spent pretty much all of their time writing together, but things really began to take shape when they moved to Los Angeles a year later.. “We got a computer and recording software and really started to experiment with it and explore things together,” says Palladino. “That’s when it became a real project.”
Music video for The Sea.
They self-released their first collection of songs, The Decline Of The West, in 2008.
The couple also married that year, exchanging vows at a scenic overlook on Mulholland Drive. They had moved to Los Angeles so that Palladino, who has been acting professionally since 14, could be available for work there. But when she was cast in Martin Scorcese’s HBO series Boardwalk Empire as bohemian artist Angela Darmody, Exitmusic were thrilled to be able to move back east. Since returning to New York in 2009, the band — which currently performs as a four piece, with drummer Dru Prentiss and electronic musician Nicholas Shelestak — has attempted to both hone and expand their sound, as well as their recording technique. Striking a balance between darkness and light, their music builds on a foundation of rhythmic electronics and synthesizers, to arrive at a sound almost operatic in scope. Recorded at home in Brooklyn over the course of the past several months, From Silence explore themes of loss, both personal and universal, “the destruction of nature and the destruction of our own nature.”
