It’s much deeper than Darkside. After impressing us with a slew of new remixes and reworks late last year, the multi-talented Dave Harrington announces a new musical group and project. The former Darkside collaborator has recruited some of his “favorite musicians and closest friends” for a new act known as the Dave Harrington Group. To introduce the endeavor, Harrington has announced the group’s debut album Become Alive and shared the LP’s title track as the band’s first record. Become Alive is also co-produced by Harrington’s former Darkside partner Nicolas Jaar. You can stream “Become Alive” and read a statement from Harrington about his new effort below. The Become Alive album will arrive on April 15.
This record is the result of improvising with different combinations of people, and then processing and re-sculpting those improvisations—isolating passages, turning them into something new, overdubbing layers of myself, maybe taking something from another piece and superimposing it out of its original context. But each track is always me interacting with other people, sometimes just one or two… sometimes ten. There was flute, vibes, organ, Fender Rhodes, guitar, bass, two drummers, percussion, sax…just full-on, over-blown energy. I took all that and treated it as raw material in the mixing stage… but when you have ten people in a room, you can only edit so much. Everything is in every microphone anyway—it’s all connected, so it’s about turning it into whatever it wants to be.