bio

Calling HI-FI SKY “just another electric ambient art rock band” is like calling a sharp, cool, dusk-red glass of Belgian beer “Mitch.”

Hi-Fi Sky make cinematic shivers of luscious drone pop. Hi-Fi Sky is Alexandra Scott and Tim Sommer. They are harmonic geologists who detect and produce melodic chillquakes. Hi-Fi Sky loves Abba and Tony Conrad. They utterly adore Terry Riley and Gram Parsons. They wish that Madonna and John Cale had a baby (bouncing) and named it Hi-Fi Sky. They pretend that Neu came from South Louisiana and giggle all the way to bayou dreamland.

Bayou dreamland is (probably) in the skies above New Orleans. New Orleans is where Alexandra Scott and Tim Sommer met, and where they discovered that they were two very different same people who shared a mutual love of Stephen Fry, orchestral punk, and cascading waterfalls of musical repetition. New Orleans -- a slanting, sinking, flaking,, shabby, pastel colored Bohotopia which is a bit like Prague, but only if you replace the whimsy with brutality -- is also where they recorded the first HI-FI SKY album, MUSIC FOR SYNCHRONIZED SWIMMING IN SPACE. Picture God bobbing on a blow-up chair in the Bermuda Triangle; this is what she would be listening to on her iPod.

MUSIC FOR SYNCHRONIZED SWIMMING IN SPACE was recorded in 2004 and 2005. It is 67 minutes of grand, ghostly, spacious, melodic sound; it is quiet music to be played very loudly, unless it is loud music to be played very quietly.

Tim Sommer was the founder of the slo-core bellwether Hugo Largo, who recorded two acclaimed albums of swirling, chiming chamber punk for Brian Eno’s Opal/Land label. Tim also played with legendary noise composer Glenn Branca for three years, starting when he was a wee but delightfully pretentious lad of 21. He also was a fairly notorious teen journalist, radio and club deejay, a sheepishly successful A&R guy, and one of Barbra Streisand’s cabana boys. Tim and Alexandra met in 2002, when he produced Alexandra’s solo album, SPYGLASS. (Actually they met before he produced the album, but never mind.)

Alexandra is originally from Charlottesville, Virginia, and began gigging locally when she was still in high school. Like Edna St. Vincent Millay and Lisa Kudrow, Alexandra attended Vassar, but unlike Millay and Kudrow, Alexandra majored in classical guitar. While still in her teens, she worked at Bearsville Studios before returning to Virginia, where she rejected numerous opportunities to pursue a more conventional -- and less original -- career in the music industry. Like Sommer, she heard a sound in her head that combined all of her strange and wonderful and silly and serious and profane and romantic influences, and which defied categorization. Frequently, she thought of this sound as a sign that she was losing her mind, as all Southern women do at one time or another.

Tim and Alexandra joined together as Hi-Fi Sky, after Tim decided to start making music again, and after he reassured Alexandra that she was not in fact loony but actually on to something good. Spelunking in the darkness of a New Orleans studio during the summer of 2004, Hi-Fi Sky found itself to be one or more of the following: a sweet and lush simple supernova, an IMAX film of Highway 61, space age folk music, chamber Hawkwind with Emmylou Harris humming along in a planetarium. It is a place where Tim’s love of punk rock and German ambient artmusic meets Alexandra’s bluegrass and folk roots, her unabashed adoration of pop melody, and her pash for for atonal minimalism. MUSIC FOR SYNCHRONIZED SWIMMING IN SPACE is produced by Tim Sommer and Alexandra Scott, and they play all of the instruments on the album, except for the string parts, for which they had the assistance of 18-year old Sam Craft, who lit up everyone’s lives by joining the live band, in which he plays lots of instruments, sometimes all at once.

SYNCH/SWIM is the first release from Seersucker Fantasy Records. Upcoming SFR release include Alexandra’s new EP, ‘SPRING’ and Tim’s still-foetal solo record (working title: LISTENING TO THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE, though some feel it should be called PLEASE MAY I HAVE A FISHSTICK?). It will also, in the near future, extend into the publishing realm, as Hi-Fi Sky is writing a novel, “Death in Hamburg,” about two people named, coincidentally, Tim Sommer and Alexandra Scott, who travel the world with their band, playing gigs and solving crimes.