High Pulp Share New Track “Never In My Sweet Short Life” Feat. MonoNeon
The members of Los Angeles’s High Pulp create an experimental jazz sound that is hinting at times to everything from Miles Davis and Duke Ellington to Aphex Twin and My Bloody Valentine. Their songs balance meticulous composition with visceral spontaneity, and the performances are nothing short of virtuosic, fueled by raw, ecstatic horn runs ducking and weaving their way around thick bass lines and dizzying percussion.
Today they are sharing the new track “Never In My Sweet Short Life” featuring MonoNeon, a colorfully dressed experimental bassist that posts prolific jams to YouTube and has played in sessions with Prince, DOMi and JD Beck, and Mac Miller. Debuting alongside the song is a new animated video in which robots are seeking companionship in the desert. Listen and watch the clip below.
Watch “Never In My Sweet Short Life” Feat. MonoNeon: https://youtu.be/t1A8uJV6RJU
"'Never In My Short Sweet Life' was the most challenging track to write to date,” said drummer Bobby Granfelt. “It had so many iterations, so many sections, and so much disagreement internally. We kept tweaking and mining the song until we stripped it down to what we believed was its core - a whimsical Flying Lotus-meets-The Beatles psychedelic odyssey. There used to be an outro with a beautiful horn arrangement, but we opted at the 11th hour to scrap it entirely and opt for a modular synthesizer-lead ambient outro featuring a baritone guitar (which is coincidentally owned by fellow ANTI- artist and friend Christian Lee Hutson). “Never In My Short Sweet Life” proved not only to be the most difficult composition to write, but also the most rewarding and collaborative."
In High Pulp there is keyboardist Antoine Martel, a mad scientist with a wall of modular synthesizers and a passion for film scores and abstract soundscapes; keyboardist Rob Homan, whose innate ability to process, deconstruct, and reassemble material on the fly bordered on the scary; bassist Scott Rixon, a convert from the metal and hardcore world with impeccable pop sensibilities and a selfless ability to serve the song; tenor saxophonist Victory Ngyuen, a Pharoah Sanders acolyte with an ear for urgent, entrancing solos of the highest order; alto saxophonist Andrew Morrill, whose bold tones and fearless harmonic sensibilities earned him a reputation for pushing the old school into the 21st century; and last but not least, Granfelt, whose hip-hop- and bebop-inspired drumming laid the foundation for the entire project.
“When you put us all together, our sound isn’t so much a fusion as it is a synthesis,” says Granfelt. “There’s a lot of different personalities coming from a lot of different places, and we use it all as fuel to create something that’s totally our own.”
High Pulp will embark on a spring West coast tour this June, beginning in Sacramento on June 8.