BCMC — the Chicago duo of Bill MacKay and Cooper Crain — have announced their second album, Stash, due June 26th via Drag City. Lead single Kaleidosmoke is out now.
Where the pair’s 2023 debut Foreign Smokes was built on spontaneous improvisation, Stash finds MacKay and Crain working with more deliberate architecture. The new album’s compositions are described as towering and groove-based, shaped by years of live shows and touring together. That shift in approach extends to the recording process: Stash was tracked onto 8-track tape by Crain and Greg Norman at Electrical Audio and Sweat Loge Studio, then mixed to 2-track tape at Sweat Loge by Crain and MacKay. The result is a fully analogue chain — no digital processing at any stage.
Kaleidosmoke offers an early glimpse of that new terrain. Clocking in at nearly eight minutes, Drag City highlight those Brit-rock-inflected guitars over a structure that owes something to the patient, accumulative logic of Terry Riley. Strands of Floyd, Deep Purple and Iron Butterfly wind through blues-scorched solos before the piece resolves into a slow, glass-like slide guitar passage. It is expansive and unhurried, psychedelic in the oldest, most saturated sense of the word.
MacKay is well known to KLOF readers through his solo work, his collaborations with Ryley Walker and the Black Duck trio, while Crain brings the dronecraft of CAVE and Bitchin Bajas to the partnership. Their debut earned praise for its spacious minimalism and improvisational freshness. With Stash, that chemistry meets tighter composition, making this a highly anticipated follow-up.
Pre-Order/Save: https://lnk.to/bcmcstash