SWINGING STARS

Description

In the past, Mapache's recording sessions have been pretty laid-back affairs, with friends coming and going, sessions starting and stopping at the group's discretion – a process as relaxed as the immaculate, sunny vibes their four albums would suggest. But on their dynamic and ambitious fifth album of cosmic folk, Swinging Stars, Sam Blasucci and Clay Finch decided to take a trip and retreat to a particularly special place. "It's a pretty striking place," Finch says about the Panoramic House, the artist retreat where Swinging Stars was recorded. "It's quite dramatic. It's a castle-like building on a hill, overlooking the bay. Located in Stinson Beach in Marin County, California, the Panoramic House has recently hosted groups like My Morning Jacket, The War on Drugs, and Cate Le Bon, and was the perfect combination of scenic beauty and self-imposed confinement to allow Mapache to settle in for their most cohesive album to date. "This environment focuses more on everyone being together for a week," Finch explains, noting that the band stayed there throughout the process, sharing all their time and energy on a common vision. "We were all captives. No one could escape," he says with a laugh. Swinging Stars, an album of calm bravado and second nature, is the natural result of a group that has existed in one form or another throughout the adult lives of its founders. Finch and Blasucci first met while they were students at La Cañada High School, just north of Los Angeles, where they both had a guitar class: "There wasn't much supervision or anything," Blasucci recalls. "It was really nice. And we got to play guitar together."