Port St. Willow’s 2012 album Holiday has easily been one of my favorite releases of the year. It’s a good late night/focus and get things done kind of album.
From the Port St. Willow website:
Port St. Willow is the project of Nicholas Principe, begun in 2009 as a recording outlet following a series of quick moves. Principe settled in Portland, OR where he released the project’s first EP, Even//Wasteland, in the Fall of 2010. Though brief, the record carried the weight of a much larger piece with movements bleeding into each other, creating a world glued together by swells of white noise and static. It provided an introduction for what was to come next.
After a period of live experimentation, Principe began working on the project’s first full length album, Holiday. Recorded over the course of a year in his Portland studio, the record is a meditation on family and self. An exploration of new and old homes, seen though the lens of a blurred and softened memory, too saturated with distance and time. And through these tunnels back, full of warm and heavy water, there are anchors that do not age. Halves of lives that grow whole, full of contradiction and mess born from a lonely place. To find the lens warped, the colors faded, and the patterns returned, is not a defeat but an understanding that we are here, bent and maybe broken in places, but here. Holiday is a love record to no one. A recognition of an ending, and an awakening of the self – unarmored and honest.
Port St. Willow is currently located in Brooklyn, NY.
Two of my favorite songs from the album, Orphan, and Consumed, are available below.
