Monday 29 August 2022 is out for Z Tapes and La Barberia Records “Windows of my house“, The third EP taken from”Pastimes“, The new album by Baseball Gregg composed for the first time with the full band and out on Friday 23 September. Since Sam’s arrival in Italy at the end of 2021, in fact, the Italian-Californian formation has made twenty songs that will be distributed over the course of three months in as many record releases and then converge in a Full Length. If “Parrots and the Park”, the first EP of the series, released in June, offered an unprecedented glimpse into a peaceful and sylvan atmosphere, and the subsequent “A Life Designed for Fun” brought the duo’s sounds back to their territories. dear, the third and final chapter of the EP trilogy risks uncharted territory for the Greggs, who indulge in Soviet-wave, twee-punk seductions and in general high BPM for pogo. The soundtrack of a summer trip to unexplored lands.
“Windows of My House” is a verse from a song contained in the EP: specifically it is “Holobiont“, A piece written jointly by Sam Regan and Luca Lovisetto that once again lingers on the relationship between us and others, the meaning of unity and corporeality, and the union between us and the organisms that compose us.
“Relatively recent technological advances of the last 20 or so years have allowed for much more extensive research into the human microbiome, and microbiologists are seeing that many aspects of humans health and well being, both physical and mental, are directly related to the biodiversity of our microbiomes. Our personal microbiomes are simultaneously inhereted genetically from our ancestors, and influenced by our daily to day actions: what we eat, what viruses are present in out bodies, who we have sex with. This has led to a view of people as being their own little ecosystems, or holobionts, that interact organically with the various holobionts and environments with which they are in contact Margaret Thatcher once infamously said that “there is no society, only individuals,” but it now seems that there is scientific evidence to refute her claim: there are no individuals, only collections or living, bustling ecosystems constantly swapping microbes.” – Sam Regan
“Pastimes”, the title of the complete album due out in September, 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 in the Paris of the Roaring Twenties.
Baseball Gregg are 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 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 and in the United States 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, Vacation in just over a month: an abundant half hour of tropical mellotron and vocal harmonies that swim across the Pacific Ocean, from the Garage della Baia to the Japanese City-pop. Vacation, recorded in Stockton in the summer of 2015 and mastered by Dylan Wall, was released on April 30, 2016 again by La Barberia on cassette and CD.
After releasing Ciao for Now and Sleep, their second LP, which features as the 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 began touring the length and breadth of 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 limited edition 120-page Calendar companion book. During the lockdown months of 2020 they write and remotely record Indoors, a 6-track EP in collaboration with Chicago bedroom pop legend Boy Romeo, released in December 2020.
On June 16, Z Tapes and La Barberia Records release Parrots and the park, the 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 and then merged into a Full Length whose publication is scheduled for next 23 September.
