Rosenau & Sanborn

After years of unofficial collaboration, Chris Rosenau of Collections of Colonies of Bees and Nick Sanborn from Sylvan Esso performed a low-pressure improvised set as a duo at a festival in 2015. Without a plan or direction, the longtime friends felt an immediate chemistry and began getting together more frequently, ultimately capturing the warm spirit of their collaborations on the homespun ambience of 2019's Bluebird, credited to the project name Rosenau & Sanborn. Experimental guitarist Chris Rosenau and multi-instrumentalist/engineer Nick Sanborn had worked together for a long time, both as members of Collections of Colonies of Bees and in various other arrangements. At 2015's inaugural Eaux Claires Festival, a music and arts festival curated by Aaron Dessner of the National and Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, the duo was scheduled to perform a brief, casual improvised set, but wound up playing for almost an hour and feeling moved by the results of their connection. They performed again at the festival for the next two years, and in October 2017 they got together at a studio in the woods of North Carolina and began tracking some of the ideas they'd been cultivating. After a weekend of recording guitar and electronics, they made some rough mixes of what they'd been recording. The very casual recording session included lots of unintentional background sounds, including birds chirping, the sounds of the woods, and the occasional dog bark. Rather than consider the sessions demos for a proper album, Rosenau & Sanborn decided to leave all of the untamed sounds and offered up their first album almost completely unedited and unrefined. The five-song album Bluebird arrived on the Psychic Hotline label in the summer of 2019. ~ Fred Thomas