Love songs, whimsical lyrics, suave instrumentals and everything falls into perspective. Meditative and yet chill music where different colours come to dwell, Magenta, Burgundy, Tangerine and so on. That is the special tone of this album.

Charming, wistful as the title and the title song. "If there were no space, I could reach the stars, I would weave them into, the streets and the cars" I would be making burgundy rhymes, exotic and impossible, yet so within the reach of a child's imagination. Sit back and relax and tap right into that innocent imagination. Not for mindless chilling.

Moonstone Mandala, Basic Necessity and Night Skies make you contemplate as you sink into a new reality. Seductive, they talk about love from beyond time. Burgundy Rhymes and Amethyst Drive are for the imaginative child within.

Moonstone Mandala had me playing a swarmandal- an Indian harp. Fly away could be talking about the lives of elves or a romantic get away, depends on you, entirely!

The instrumentals each have varied aspects of downtempo, jazzy and chill feel added to them.
These tunes get stuck in your head and will have you repeating the playlist.
A little splash of thought in a hurried day? Check out Burgundy Rhymes.

Bird song recording to create a natural feeling in your living space. No music, just a symphony of birds. Recorded on a spring morning in the Central Highlands of Victoria, Australia.

I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land where this recording was made, they are the Dja Dja Wurrung people of the Lalgambook (Mount Franklin) area.

"A bird does not sing because it has an answer. It sings because it has a song." - Chinese proverb

Giovanni Girolamo Kapsberger's (c.1580-1651) works for theorbo are virtuosic, exploratory and peculiar: his baffling and brilliant use of rhythm (at a time when most other virtuoso players were pounding the semi-quavers) stewed with his surprisingly-odd chromatic harmony lends his music an obscure and surprising quality. As a result of his unconventional style his direct musical influences are ephemeral. He spent most of his life working in the same household (Cardinal Barberini's: the nephew of Pope Urban VIII) in Rome as Girolamo Frescobaldi; inevitably close during their presumed co-development of the toccata form: - 'toccata' translates as 'touched' - but otherwise much of K's life and music eludes us. By the 1610s the toccata was a fantasy form born out of sixteenth-century preambulatory forms such as the prelude, ricercar and 'tastar de corde' (to tune the strings): juxtaposed sections of blindingly florid passages and fugal polyphony are abruptly joined in a theatrical improvisatory style.

This album focuses primarily on Kapsberger's preludes and toccatas with only a few dance movements (gagliarda, corrente etc.) thrown in for their notable and enjoyable peculiarities. All the pieces recorded are from Kapsberger's 3rd (1626) and 4th (1640) books for theorbo. Kapsberger's 2nd book of theorbo (chitarrone) music still remains to be found.

'[Kapsberger] with his superb genius and other scientific skills in which he was expert, successfully penetrated the secrets of music.'
Anathasius Kircher: Musurgia Universalis (1650)

Recorded (mostly) live on May 26, 2012 by The Bad Verse:

Allen Coté - vocals, guitars, banjolele, fox horn
Jeff Brueggeman - bass
Kavi Laud - drums, percussion, vocals
Ryan Elliott - 12-string guitar
Sarah Gilbert - vocals, organ, chaos

Additional overdubs by:

Dan Bullock - vibraphone, accordion
Lisa Ridgely - vocals
Nick Berg - mellotron, organ, piano, Rhodes, Wurlitzer

Special thanks to Wolfgang Schaefer for the D-28; Hunter S. Thompson, Jim
Henson, Brian Wilson, Mike Love, Dillion Dietzman and S.C. Johnson & Son for the inspiration; y mezcal para la pasion.

Released January 18, 2016.

Engineered, mixed and mastered by Ryan Elliott at 77eleven Productions
Additional engineering by Allen Coté and Nick Berg
Produced by Allen Coté and Ryan Elliott

All songs written by Allen Coté and published by Dézòd Rèkòd (ASCAP)