Sunfort

Vinyl edition is limited to 165 hand numbered copies.

Old Unconscious is an experimental instrumental project from Portland, OR led by Cory Gray on keys and trumpet, featuring Matthew Berger on drums and percussion, Perry Pfister on bass and Noah Bernstein on saxophones. It is a balance of composition and improvisation and frequently features guest players and percussionists.

This group started as just a fun recording project by me and Cory Gray at his Old Unconscious Studios. Actually, the seed was planted in my living room in Sellwood with an upright piano and a drum set after a dinner made by Cory and a couple good bottles of wine. Cory and I had played a lot of music together with a lot of different groups in Portland and wanted to start something strictly for our own entertainment. Old Unc became a way for us to open up and improvise and do really whatever we wanted to do musically. Cory had a ton of melodies so we started to arrange them. We never really intended to be a live band, but people liked it so we recruited Perry Pfister (bass) and Noah Bernstein (saxes) to join us and started to play small shows. In March of 2017, the full group released the first recordings on our friend's Curly Cassettes label and called them Why Something. We still try to only play non-traditional venues because we like it to be more of a musical hang rather than a sit-and-analyze-us kind of thing. Lots of improvising. Lots of different styles. Never the same way twice. The only rule is to have fun.

Cory has played piano and horns with almost everyone under the sun in Portland (Dandy Warhols, The Delines, Norfolk & Western...) and records many others in his NE Portland studio. Perry makes neon signs under the name The Tiny Spoon, is from Louisiana and has played bass with lots of great bands in New Orleans and PDX (Run On Sentence, Mama Rosa, Nick Delffs). Noah is a Portland sax man extraordinaire (GRAMMIES, Shy Girls, Mike Gamble...), bagel guru and a regular on the Creative Music Guild circuit. I'm Matt Berger, a drummer/percussionist/musicology nerd/sailor who has been on the PDX music scene for twelve years (Laura Veirs, Musée Mecanique, Laura Gibson...). We love to have guests sit in and are often joined by Jealous Butcher label-mate Dan Hunt (Neko Case, Ages and Ages, solo performer...) on percussion.

The basic tracks for the new album Sunfort were done live in one night at Type Foundry Studio with the help of the maestro/producer/engineer John Askew and then lots of overdubs at Cory's studio and mastering by Jon Neufeld. Dan Hunt and Tucker Martine joined on drums. Rob Jones from Jealous Butcher Records is our knight in shinning armor and made our vinyl. We're already recording new stuff. The idea with this group is to keep moving forward and do different things every time...