Baseball Gregg’s Italian-Californian project is back with a new EP, the first of a series of three. Welcome to a new summer with pastel colors and acoustic lo-fi sounds
Out for Z Tapes e La Barberia Records “Parrots and the park“the first EP taken from “Pastimes”the new album by Baseball Gregg composed for the first time with the full band. Since Sam’s arrival in Italy at the end of 2021, the Italian-Californian formation has made twenty songs that will be distributed over the course of three months in as many record releases to then merge into a Full Length whose publication is scheduled for September.
Acoustic, soft mood, late spring summer pieces with cello. The cello, as well as the double bass, are a new timbre in the sound of Baseball Gregg. The release date is not accidental: June 16 is the Bloomsday, that is the day in which Ulysses of Ulysses is set in 1904 James Joyce. The Irish author represents the fil rouge of the three EPs and the album, starting with the title of the latter: Pastimes is a quote from the passage “Pastimes are past times“Present in Finnegans Wake, and Joyce’s daughter is depicted in the four artworks that accompany the works. Sam Regan reinterpreted the photos Berenice Abbott took of Lucia Joyce (a dance star at the time, just before the sad end in the asylum where she will be locked up until the end of her days) in the Paris of the Roaring Twenties. Parrots and the park is a verse contained in Cilantro Grass, a song that has already been played in April for Live in Tuci https://youtu.be/FSZ_uvlzjTE.
I Baseball Gregg I’m Samuel and Luca. The first comes from the city of the Pavements, the second is a fellow countryman of Guglielmo Marconi: they met in Bologna in 2013 and became friends. The first songs take shape in a small rented room at the beginning of via Mazzini and are recorded in a dozen torrid late spring evenings on the top floor of a Bolognina-style building. Sam – after a year spent in Italy – returns to America at the end of May: Luca greets the airplane clutching a box full of songs in his fist. The eponymous EP by Baseball Gregg was released on cassette simultaneously in Italy (La Barberia Records – Modena) and in the United States (Harlot – Brooklyn) on Cassette Store Day 2014.
In July 2015 the two meet again, this time for a vacation in California. However, they spend the sunny afternoons of July and August closed in Sam’s bedroom to write, produce, and play. Thus they recorded their debut on LP in just over a month, Vacation precisely: an abundant half hour of tropical mellotron and vocal harmonies swimming across the Pacific Ocean, from the Garage of the Bay to the Japanese City-pop. Vacation, recorded in Stockton, California in the summer of 2015 and mastered by Dylan Wall (Weed, Craft Spells), was released on 30 April 2016 also by La Barberia on cassette (in the United States) and on CD (in Italy).
After posting Ciao for Now (2016) – a small experimental pop extravaganza recorded during the holidays in Italy in the summer of 2016 – e Sleep (2018), their second LP, which features as a cover an original artwork by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thai director and artist, winner of the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2010, the band has started shooting far and wide across the United States and Europe, performing at SXSW and Iceland Airwaves.
In 2019 the band began an extensive tour in the US and Europe, appearing at SXSW and Iceland Airwaves. Every month of 2019 Baseball Gregg released a new song: the project, titled Calendar, unfolded slowly, one song at a time. These 12 singles were collected in a physical album, released on February 28, 2020 via Z Tapes (Slovakia) on vinyl and cassette, while La Barberia released a “Calendar companion book”In a limited edition of 120 pages. During the lockdown months of 2020 they write and remotely record Indoors, a 6-track EP in collaboration with the bedroom pop legend of Chicago Boy Romeopublished in December 2020.
It’s out for now Z Tapes e La Barberia Records Parrots and the parkthe first EP taken from Pastimes, the new Baseball Gregg album composed for the first time with the full band. Since Sam’s arrival in Italy at the end of 2021, the Italian-Californian formation has made twenty songs that will be distributed over the course of three months in as many record releases to then merge into a Full Length whose publication is scheduled for September.
