Lea Thomas and John Thayer have been collaborating in one form or another for more than a decade. Also partners in life with a homestead in New York’s Catskill Mountains, they’ve developed distinct creative identities along the way—Thomas as a solo artist, Thayer as a percussionist and producer. Miyaxx is the place where their talents fully converge, a futuristic folk landscape that’s as dreamy as it is reorienting.
The pair worked as a lean, mean self-contained unit on Hold Your Ego Out Like A Sun (Triple Dolphin). Acoustic and 12-string guitars, drums, bass and organ comingle with modular electronics, drum machines, distortion and extensive processing. Impromptu percussion enters the mix alongside field recordings of birds, storms and summer nights. The result is less a collision of tradition, technology and nature than a conversation between all three.
Here’s more from Thomas and Thayer.
—Hobart Rowland
1) “Blue Cloud White Sky”
Thomas: “In troubling times, I find respite by returning to the elements and this simple truth: We are nature, and we are just a small part of the beauty in this world. This song and video are reflections on how reverence can sometimes even feel ecstatic.”
2) “What Gathers At Dusk”
Thomas: “The melodic motif in this song is woven throughout a few songs on the album in different forms. I’d been playing it here and there but never found the right words for it, so it was the first thing we experimented with when we started writing for this album. It became an exploration of vocal-processing techniques—and of finding out what happens when you destroy the sound of an acoustic guitar with a wall of fuzz.”
3) “Hold Your Ego Out Like A Sun”
Thomas: “I was reading Joseph Campbell’s The Power Of Myth while we were working on this album, and it got me thinking about how, throughout history and across cultures, people have looked to common symbols like the sun, the crow, fire and song in hopes of seeing some part of their own stories in the greater myths being shared. There’s something about recognizing those symbols that can make us feel less alone in our experiences of grief, love, joy and death. The arrangement on this song is one of the more layered on the record. But like all of the songs, everything is played by the two of us.”
4) “Go Easy”
Thomas: “This song speaks to the way life’s highs and lows can mirror the cycles of the seasons. I find hope in remembering the ease of a cool breeze on a warm day—and in trusting that, in a world where change is constant, darkness will eventually give way to brighter days again.”
5) “Everything Leans Towards Light”
Thayer: “This is a choir of Lea’s voice paired with the sound of a summer night in the Catskills. The title speaks to a belief in a universal desire to choose light over darkness. I tend to enhance the sound field of tracks by using homemade percussion sounds filtered through my modular rig—and that became part of the texture here.”
6) “Laying Down Your Name”
Thayer: “This features a field recording captured moments before a summer storm. The birds are still singing while the thunder hints at what’s about to come.”
7) “Night Garden”
Thayer: “Lea is a gardener, and this song was inspired by falling in love with the beauty and mystery of night-blooming flowers and returning to the solace of the garden when the world feels quiet. This one started with the bass and drum-machine pulse and found its footing after we revisited Talk Talk’s Spirit Of Eden. That inspired us to add the coda, where the more minor-chord progression shifts into a major-key celebration.”
8) “The Shape You Make Returning”
Thayer: “This is a meditative, fuzzed-out ambient composition influenced by the cyclical nature of life. We actually tracked the song early in the record-making process. But after touring it in Japan, we went back into the studio and recut it. It’s often the case that taking a piece of music to the stage yields a new perspective. That was definitely true with this one.”
9) “Carry Your Love”
Thomas: “This was inspired by symbolism carried throughout the centuries—strength as a dragon, life as a river and as seasons, hope as the sun. It also features recordings of homemade grass shakers from our garden.”
10) “Stones Remember Rain”
Thayer: “Do rocks have memory? Does a river possess an awareness of its past? This is an animist-infused ambient piece built around an organ drone, blooped guitar loops and an attempt to make Lea’s guitar sound like whale song.”
11) “What Gathers At Dawn”
Thayer: “This is the closing refrain of the LP—a 12-string take on the motif woven throughout the album. It’s the least processed and folkiest tune on the record, and it seemed like a fitting conclusion—bringing that recurring musical idea back one last time in its simplest form.”
