The Halocline

So whats up with the name?

The Halocline

    Blitzed out of our gourds, Nathan and I were watching Planet Earth. On the screen, David is describing the cenotes of the Yucatan Peninsula. A halocline, he says, is the boundary where a body of fresh water meets a body of salt water. A shot of a cave diver shows them appearing to surface from the water, only to breach the line and remain underwater. You are in the water looking up and see the surface of air, you pass the boundary, desperate to take a breath, and find yourself gasping for air.  We found it to be a perfect analogy for what we were experiencing at the time. That fateful time one finds themselves in at the end of high school. Eye roll, finger gun to temple. The stereotypical coming-of-age pains that everyone finds in their late teens. But their ubiquitous nature does not diminish their gravity. The wholly important feeling of looking out from the precipice of juvenescence. Being at the crossroads of all your possible futures, at the bottleneck of adulthood, and feeling as though no choice is the right one. A trope for the ages, spammed like original sin or star crossed lovers. Our voice in the chorus added some ten dollar word and a song.

    In the basement, in between songs, in between practice, there was still music. Something more subtle and ambient than usual. We were (and remain) fans of Gregory Alan Isakov at the time. Nathan especially so. In Isakov’s songs, there are moments of beautiful musical textures and sounds adjacent to the instruments themselves. Nathan said he called them “god sounds”. One of Nathan’s interpretations of that was a pedal board, slide, and ebow. Some low drone that sounded akin to a cello. Some heavenly sound that arced above it. These ambient god sounds rolling around the room reminded this non-churchgoer of something hymn-like.  

It set the tone for those moments in between songs to feel somewhat holy. A scared space of sound that was one of rest and readying. In the context of where we found ourselves at the time, there rang out a sense of us divining our way onward. From the end of all that we knew in school to the beginning of everything we could choose to do after, it felt as though there was a hidden passage just out of sight, that wasn’t there before. “The Halocline” became our shorthand for that. Our distilled articulation of choosing this over all else. Of making our own sense of living. Of remembering what felt sacred to us. When we say “This is our home” we certainly mean Minnesota (a reason we only play it at hometown shows). But we also mean it in the spiritual, social sense of finding our place in the world by way of each other.

    It was fitting to put this song at the end of the South EP to give it its emotional finale. It also felt fitting to put the Bashful Creatures and South EPs together under the moniker “The Halocline” EPs. It was the title of the chapter in which we discovered this band, and the songs we wrote around that time. It still serves as our handle for most social media accounts, to the chagrin and confusion of everyone who has tried to follow us. But, for us, it also serves as a waypoint back to who we were and why we chose this over all else.

listen to the demo & more photos below…