Blake Mills is a guitarist, Grammy-winning producer, and recording artist. He is best known as a session musician and vocalist as well as a producer and remixer. Mills has performed on well over 200 recordings with artists ranging from Kid Rock, Dangermouse, and Paulo Nutini to Norah Jones, Lana Del Rey, and Weezer. He began recording as a headline artist with 2010’s Break Mirrors, but his breakthrough was with 2014’s widely celebrated Heigh Ho. The self-produced album’s sidemen included Don Was, Jim Keltner, Mike Elizondo, and Benmont Tench. That same year, he worked with Diana Krall, Johnny Hallyday, Alabama Shakes, and Sara Bareilles. Mills continued to work as a sideman and touring musician with John Legend, Randy Newman, Bruce Hornsby, and Jim James. He reentered the studio to issue his 2018 all-instrumental offering Look, which he followed with the critically acclaimed Mutable Set two years later. In 2021, Mills collaborated with Welsh songwriter, bassist, and producer Pino Palladino on the New Deal/Impulse! studio outing Notes with Attachments. Mills began his musical career as a founding member of Simon Dawes with Taylor Goldsmith. They recorded and released the EP What No One Hears in 2005 and the full-length Carnivore in 2006. After he left, the band shortened their name to Dawes. Mills became a touring guitarist for Jenny Lewis. He also served as a hired gun for Band of Horses, Lucinda Williams, and Julian Casablancas. Until that time, Mills never really considered himself a solo artist. His first recording on his own, Break Mirrors, was released with the intention of securing more session work and becoming a producer. The end result was widely acclaimed for its overall originality in writing, arranging, and producing. His strategy worked. He co-produced Jesca Hoop’s The House That Jack Built in 2011, and produced fiddler Sarah Watkins’ sophomore release, Sun Midnight Sun. Mills produced, co-produced, and/or played on several tracks by several other musicians as well as contributing to compilations. His co-production and performance of “Oh Well,” with Billy Gibbons and Matt Sweeney on the tribute album Just Tell Me That You Want Me: A Tribute to Fleetwood Mac was considered by many to be the set’s highlight. Mills began recording his sophomore offering, Heigh Ho, at Capitol’s Ocean Way studio (the room was built for Frank Sinatra) with a host of guests who included Fiona Apple, Jon Brion, Benmont Tench, Don Was, and Jim Keltner. The album was released in September 2014. Mills produced Alabama Shakes’ 2015 LP Sound & Color, which wound up snagging him a Grammy nomination for Producer of the Year, Non-Classical. He also shared in the record’s win for Best Alternative Album of the Year. During 2016 and 2017, he produced albums by Perfume Genius and Dawes. He returned to his solo career in 2018 with Look, an instrumental album recorded while he was learning how to play vintage guitar synthesizers. After the requisite touring and more studio work with Bruce Hornsby, Bareilles, Andrew Bird, and others, Mills reentered the studio in 2019 with a slew of musicians who included Rob Moose, Cass McCombs, Pino Palladino, Patrick Warren, Sam Gendel, and Gabriel Kahane. He crafted Mutable Set, a collection of 11 songs as a soundtrack to the emotional dissonance of modern life. He co-wrote five tracks with McCombs and another with Kahane. The full-length was released in May of 2020. Throughout 2020, Mills worked with bassist/producer/composer Pino Palladino, who was cutting his first-ever solo recording after a four-decade career in music. As the pair cut and added to tracks in their respective studios with many different musicians, they sent their contributions back and forth digitally. In short order they realized the project had become a full-scale collaboration. Each selection originated from Palladino’s melodic and rhythmic languages, then developed outward by referencing influences shared by the two musicians, including West African and Cuban music, funk, jazz, English folk, and more. The finished result was the eight-track Notes with Attachments. It was issued by New Deal/Impulse! in March 2021.

Combining a significant technical proficiency with an avant-garde approach to jazz, Los Angeles saxophonist Sam Gendel came up in the 2010s underground with a forward-thinking approach to the genre. Having made a name for himself under the Inga moniker, Gendel began releasing under his own name in 2017, producing a plethora of experimental projects both individually and with the assistance of his contemporaries. Raised on the works of John Coltrane, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and Wayne Shorter, Los Angeles-based jazz musician Sam Gendel took up the saxophone at age ten after buying one from a retired policeman in California for $50.00. Working throughout his teens to master the instrument, Gendel gradually found his own vision among L.A.’s ever-shifting jazz scenes. Breaking through alongside Kevin Yokota (drums) and Adam Ratner (guitar) as Inga, Gendel released his first full-length project as part of the trio with 2015’s en which saw Gendel follow his icons’ spiritual progressions, moving through psychedelic, meditative, and transcendent styles with vision and proficiency. en was followed shortly by 2016’s Volunteered Slavery EP, a project which paid homage to one of Gendel’s early icons through a cover of the titular Kirk track. That same year he made a record with fellow L.A. iconoclast Taylor Mackall titled Saudade. Inga’s May 2017 single “Crossroads” was their last. The first music to arrive under Gendel’s own name was the 2017 project Double Expression, a two-hour odyssey composed primarily of field recordings and one-takes. Using a long-form approach to the genre with 40-minute-plus tracks, the album was inspired by (and sampled from) many of Gendel’s street performances, mimicking their use of a loop station with short recordings from his phone. This was followed just a few weeks later by his debut album, 4444: continuing to work with Ratner and Yokota, the project made a direct shift in sound, diverging from long-form and saxophone-driven material in favor of subdued vocal jazz. Underscored by Ratner’s melodic guitars and Yokota’s measured drumming, Gendel embraced his own vocal experimentation 4444, and displayed his instrumental proficiency while employing his voice to deliver cryptic political opinions and emotional musings. Gendel next pushed his saxophone to its limits for 2018’s sophomore album Pass If Music: Comprised solely of sounds made using his alto sax, the project traversed uncharted territory, with standard notes warped into vocal-esque wails and electronic trills. This was bookended by another collaborative set, Music for Saxofone and Bass Guitar, which saw Gendel team up with Sam Wilkes for a minimalist, exploratory work utilizing the duo’s instrumental talents. Gendel’s third album arrived just over a year later. Titled Satin Doll, the work unpacks Gendel’s extensive list of influences and techniques, blending his experimental tendencies with jazz standards to form a self-described “futuristic homage to historical jazz.” The project eventually saw release in March 2020, with assistance from close collaborators Gabe Noel (electric bass) and Philippe Melanson (percussion). Gendel returned later that year with fourth LP DRM: a futuristic, electronically-driven set, the project derived inspiration from modern mainstream music and Gendel’s experimentation with vintage instruments.

Hailing from Sydney Australia, Abe started playing drums at the tender age of one & has never looked back.

Now 29 & residing in Los Angeles California he is a member of his musical mentor Meshell Ndegeocello’s band.

He has been writing, recording, performing as a multi instrumentalist & touring extensively with other artists/producers such as Seal, Andrew Bird, Sara Barellies, Pino Palladino, Blake Mills & Mark Ronson.

 His father is renowned Sydney musician/producer Victor Rounds & he is named after world-renowned bass player Abraham Laboriel Snr. Abe is a graduate of Newtown High School of the Performing Arts (09’) & Berklee College of Music (14’) where he received the Alan Dawson Achievement award. As a TV composer he has contributed to all 5 seasons of Own network series “Queen Sugar” directed by Ava Duvernay & produced by Oprah Winfrey. He has also contributed original score to Netflix release, “Madam CJ Walker” , “We The People” produced by the Obamas & upcoming Starz release “Black Mafia Family”.

​

2021 brings the debut of his first solo record release on ‘Colorfield Records’.

Arny Margret never expected anyone to hear her songs. A homebody who had long worked in her family’s bakery in a small fishing town in the Westfjords of Iceland serendipitously found herself in the little Reykjavik studio of producer Guðm. Kristinn Jónsson—Kiddi, as she’d soon begin to call him—back in 2021. She tracked 10 tunes in a day and soon returned to track 10 more in what would later become the catalyst work for her sensational 2022 debut album, they only talk about the weather —a startlingly lucid snapshot of an indie folk start, tender feelings tucked into alluring melodies. In Margret’s songs, life could be disorienting; in her early work with Kiddi, she reckoned with it, safely.

Following the release of her debut, Marget was touring the world, opening for like minded artists like Leif Vollebekk, Blake Mills, Julian Lage, and Wilco. On the heels of U.S. support dates in Spring 2024, she arrived in Durham, North Carolina, to begin recording her spellbinding second album, I Miss You, I Do, with Brad Cook (Bon Iver, Waxahatchee, Hurray For The Riff Raff)—the first of three Americans who co-produced the album alongside her. Despite wanting to try new things and a new approach with this release, Margret found herself feeling already ready to go home, as she missed the comforts of the places she knew and felt anxious about the unknown. Yet soon, sitting in the control room of Cook’s studio, she found resolution as they listened to the playback of “Took the Train ’til the End,” a devastating and personal portrait of how it feels to never feel seen, as if you’re camouflaged from your own life. As the warm piano chords of Cook’s older brother, Phil, cradled Margret’s bittersweet voice and soft guitar, Brad began to cry, stirred by the new shape this song about trying to find self-definition had taken. Margret knew then that the fear of the unknown she’d had was worth it; that her ambitions for her second album were being realized in real time. This was the start of an important journey, an exquisite album.

Margret and Cook cut one other song in Durham, “Greyhound Station,” a complicated number about homesickness, newness, and what it means to not forgive or forget, written days earlier on tour. Soon after, she headed west to Boulder, Colorado, where Gregory Alan Isakov—the songwriter who helped inspire her to play, sing, and write in the first place—keeps his own studio. She briefly met Isakov, but it was producer Andrew Berlin who captured two of the album’s most affecting moments with Margret. On “Crooked Teeth,” above keyboards that feel as haunted as memory and banjo that feels like a reassuring hand on a cold shoulder, Margret sings of schoolyard neglect and the kind of hurt that can last a lifetime if you don’t let it out. The song speaks of family inheritance, as does the album closer “Happy New Year,” where Margret renders the turning of the calendar’s page as a reminder of what is on the verge of being lost and the soon-to-be-vanquished possibility of what’s to come. She sings these feelings with breathtaking candor, while Berlin captures it with perfect mystery and menace.

There was one more stop on Margret’s itinerary of American studios: New York, to start work with Josh Kaufman (Bonny Light Horseman, Bob Weir, The Hold Steady), another noted producer whose résumé had dazzled her and whose sense of invention in the studio now wowed her. Kaufman took Margret’s songs as invitations to dive in and build textural microcosms. Classical guitar that sounds like a question mark and icy synthesizers that conjure emotional vertigo trace “Maybe I’ve Wasted My Time,” a wistful song of equal parts loss and wonder. And his woozy drums and phosphorescent feedback during “I Miss You, I Do,” both like distant transmissions from Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind, reinforce Margret’s sense of longing, as if forever searching for a center that can no longer even hold. Kaufman urged her into new spaces, exactly why she had come.

Margret is the first to admit that so many of her subjects are sad and somber, burdened by the weight of the past. But for the first time in her short yet exciting career, there is a lightness to all of it, too, as if she recognizes that these are only the travails of growing up and that, in these songs, she is moving gracefully toward a future. That becomes apparent during “Born in Spring,” the last song written and one of three songs recorded for I Miss You, I Do, after she had returned to Iceland and reunited with Kiddi (who also mixed the album). A hymn about badly wanting something in your life but knowing the fit will never be quite right, it is strangely buoyant, as if the burgeoning recognition that some things are better left in the past reassures Margret. It is a sign of maturity, of moving forward, perhaps of the kind of growth that comes from putting yourself in uncomfortable situations. I Miss You, I Do depends on moments like this, moments that remind us that life has yet to be lived in its entirety.

The making of I Miss You, I Do affirms exactly that. It was always less about the producers themselves than the process of engaging with the unfamiliar; of overcoming, stretching, and expanding oneself. Ask Margret now if the anxiety, homesickness, fatigue, and general discomfort of leaving Iceland to record in the United States was worth it, and she just laughs knowingly. Of course it was. “The main thing I wanted for this album was for it to be different. When I listen to the last one, I feel like it’s mainly about me and the guitar. It’s very stripped back. I think I wanted to do more–I love banjo, the fuller sound, I love the American sound, so recording all over there made a big difference,” she explains. “All the people that I worked with brought something new to it. I’ve always worked with the same people in the same places; I never thought I could do this, work with all these people who record with some of my favourite musicians. I really admire everyone on this. And pushing myself out of my comfort zone, that’s quite rewarding.” The sounds she encountered, the sights that informed her songs, the grown men she made cry: This is the stuff of I Miss You, I Do, where an already-striking songwriter takes a monumental step forward. She turns new inspirations into a stunning window into the changing ways she sees the world.