A decade-plus on the road, near-constant musical output, and shifting creative priorities caused the revered Austin duo, comprised of multi-instrumentalists Rob Lowe and Michael Muller, to soberly assess the band's future. What, in the form of Balmorhea, was there left to say? And did they have the energy to say it?
Stranger, the group's maximalist, genre-leaping full-length from 2012, had already seemed to trace the group's farthest bounds. And, over the years, they'd worked with a roving cast of accomplished string and rhythm players to craft a glassy-eyed, sage-brushed, instrumental Americana that, while celebrated in The New Yorker, Pitchfork and The Atlantic, among myriad other press, and attracting the film, ad, and television worlds risked pigeonholing them for good.
As they had in the beginning, in 2006, Muller and Lowe worked simply and with restraint, letting intuition guide them as they molded the 10 elegant, spacious gestures that comprise Clear Language. A relaxed, clear-eyed wonder tumbles through these songs like herons lancing through Kerouac's "hungermaking" fog. Clear Language is the sound of two friends transmitting unfettered meaning in a milieu choked by double-speak at every turn.
credits
releases September 22, 2017

Texas based duo Balmorhea are back with new music! After an intensive five-year touring phase, the two founders of Balmorhea, Rob Lowe and Michael A. Muller, took a break from touring to improvise and experiment together again. Her new album The Wind, inspired by meditations on the natural world and its fragility, an ancient story about a saint who carried the wind into a vacuum in France, and thoughts of climate activist Greta Thunberg, who crossed the Atlantic on the catamaran La Vagabonde , draws a journey through an evocative soundscape, touched by echoes of prayer flags fluttering in a Himalayan breeze, an old harmonium, a pipe organ, a trio of double basses, wind chimes and beguiling guitar and piano instruments. The Wind marks both a return to Balmorhea's original constellation as a duo and a new beginning as their first album to be released by Deutsche Grammophon.