Hi Everyone!





This is Noel’le Longhaul, Justin Fallon, and Nicholas Francis from the band Mallory. We have decided to record a new album, and we also decided to ask for a little bit of help to make it happen.

For all of us, Mallory was both tremendously exciting, and tremendously difficult. The amount of energy that it generated immense–we were fully immersed in it. We lived together, traveled together, fought each other tooth and nail, and loved each other boundlessly. There has never been a period in any of our lives of so much laughter, so many bad haircuts, and so many tears.

We stopped being a band in 2010. We all had different reasons for needing to stop at the time, but were all at a point of needing a giant step back. It could be that we needed new influences in our lives, or it could have been that the moments we had were too much to be able to process all at once. Mallory became something we couldn’t keep up with.

We spent two years out of touch. Justin spent a year teaching in Uganda, worked on farms, and continued playing music with other people. Noel’le finished university and began their own projects in tattooing, printmaking, and music. Niko moved to Berlin, Germany to rediscover his german roots and to work in activist technology.

For us, what most primarily defined Mallory was its energy. It had a distinctly folk punk sound, in ways due to our newness at our instruments. Niko learned how to play guitar, accordian and banjo to play in that band. It was also Noel’le’s first experience with the banjo. We got to a point where the instrumentation we were working with, our abilities as musicians, and our maturity levels and ability to be accountable to ourselves and each other blew out. We all spent a good deal of time hurting because of it. Despite the hurt, or perhaps because of it, we all feel a huge amount of gratitude for the time we spent together and the chance to do it again. In the four years we have spent working on ourselves and our craft, we have grown as musicans, friends, and community members. We recognize that asking for money to do this is an incredibly privileged position, and would not do so if we did not believe that what were are going to do is good and worthwhile. We are hard working, dedicated, and perseverant. We believe that our gratitude and our hard work will be clearly audible in whatever we produce.

We believe that the intense level of energy that characterized our sound several years ago will still be present, but with a greater degree of respect for the history of our instruments, a more nuanced love of subtlety and quietude, and an excitement about transitioning our sound into a larger, louder, amplified, and more practiced space. Our core instrumentation will remain the same–banjo, guitar, bass, group vocals. You can expect to hear more electronic sounds and for there to be a consistent presence of drums. You can expect for us to make music you can dance your beautiful butts off to, cry to, and scream along to.

We want to stay true to the spaces and scenes and people that empowered in the past, and we want to actively create space that others can locate themselves in and feel welcome in. For a little while, mallory contributed to a beautiful collective space in New England. Many of you have contacted us saying that what we were doing then meant a great deal to you. We want to do that again, and we want to do it better than we did then.

The scope of our project will involve writing and recording a new album in Berlin, Germany. We need to cover travel costs and need a little help with our cost of living. We hope that we will give back far more than what we ask for. Ideally, we eventually want to release our new record on vinyl, and make a full and expansive amount of art for it to nest in.

Mallory has never had any type of external funding. Our last two albums were completely self funded, and we took tours and played shows and recorded albums on the short breaks that we could get from needing to work, or driving back from shows at 3 in the morning to work again at 6. The stress of that this is another reason we are asking for help from our community to be able to concentrate on having the time to do it right this time.

So - We have put together a little compilation album on our bandcamp page (malloryfolk.bandcamp.com) with a minimum price. It includes no material that can’t be downloaded for free on another CD because we believe that our music should be free, and the digital format allows for that to happen so swimmingly. We would like this album to be thought of as a donation of sorts. Feel free to download our older albums as well. We have also put together a paypal donation button on our website (malloryband.org) in case that is easier.

When the album is finished, and depending on our financial situations, we are considering going on a tour next fall in the USA, which would make us all so so happy. This will only be possible, though, by also not working during that time. Any help is immensely appreciated. Feel free to contact us at mallory dot naj at gmail dot com with any questions, excitements, or concerns.





Donate! (malloryband.org)

Download the Compilation (malloryfolk.bandcamp.com)





With all of our hearts,





Noel’le

Justin

Niko





(Source: malloryfolk.bandcamp.com)