Released on May 13, 2013
HWY-035
Digital
Purchase Album
Featured Collaborators
Jherek Bischoff
Jherek Bischoff
Songs
- Zelda Maria
- Orange Grove (Demo)
- Doppelganger Goes Home (Casio Chorus)
- Middle Name (Soft Encounters Remix)
Notes
"No single show took my breath away the way [People Get Ready's] did -- part rock concert, part performance art, part dance, all perfectly melded together... It felt like a band creating a music video for every piece of music performed." -- NPR's Bob Boilen on his favorite concert of 2012
The "Zelda Maria EP" is a four-song release by Brooklyn's indie band-slash-performance group People Get Ready. The highlight is "Zelda Maria," the second single from their self-titled debut LP which was released in autumn 2012. The rest of the release is intended as a look inside the band's process -- a drone-heavy demo of album track "Orange Grove," an instrumental B-side, and a psyche-dance remix by Soft Encounters aka Luke Fasano, who is leaving active duty with the group's touring incarnation.
The video for the song indulges in '80s nostalgia in a way made possible only by contemporary technology. First People Get Ready turned to one of America's most influential contemporary choreographers, Tere O'Connor, to develop raw movement material (O'Connor has won multiple honors including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Creative Capital Award and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.) After capturing PGR's and Tere's collaboration, the band's founder, Steven Reker, worked with video artist Ty Flowers to manipulate and edit the footage.
Reker says of the song: "Zelda Maria came together right before we recorded it. I had recently finished watching Michaelangelo Antonioni's film The Passenger for the 2nd or 3rd time. There is this scene in the end that played over and over in my head - Jack asking Maria "What can you see now?" I lifted the dialogue and fit it into a melody that popped up from the keyboard parts I was fiddling with, and a few days later we were tracking the song with Jherek Bischoff. It became the most collaborative song on the record - Luke Fasano had input on how and when the keyboards shifted - Jen Goma wrote the little guitar lick - James Rickman, Jherek and I worked on the funky bass line - it was real fun! Zelda Maria sounds best when you play it super loud - like most things."