Behind the Music: 'Contact' by Pepo Galán & Sita Ostheimer

THE PRESENT WITHIN THE FUTURE
I got to know Past Inside The Present, thanks to my friend Agus Mena (Warmth).  I remember him telling me about a new record label that would be interested in reissuing his album Parallel.  I accessed the link on the website and immediately fell in love with the aesthetic, photography, the artists involved, and I immediately realized that this would be a good, healthy place with potential where I could make friends.  I spoke to Sita Ostheimer about this label, and it is the first time that we have recorded an album specifically to send to a label.  Of course, we tried our luck.  And finally, here we are with a new family that supports musicians in a special way that few do.

PIANO AND ORCHESTRA
I have been lucky to have a brother who is also music lover.  We were in contact with music from a very young age.  We were always attracted to Punk, Hardcore, Heavy, and Rockabilly music. In the mid-nineties we started to be interested in electronic music and Trip Hop and we discovered the Kranky and Warp labels.  We were then drawn to Arvö Part, Craig Armstrong, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and the soundtracks that Joe Hisaishi created for Takeshi Kitano films.

All that music was full of orchestrations, pianos with a lot of drama.  At that time I was playing drums in the Trip Hop band Maydrïm, and I started playing the double bass in a self-taught way.  My brother played hard techno records at big festivals and sampled orchestrations from old movie soundtracks he had on vinyl.  Contact has a lot to do with all of that.  My contact with the music that I love, and my 5 years of contact with Sita Ostheimer.

NORMALITY AND PALM TREES
I have a weakness for plants.  I worked as a gardener when I was a teenager and was able to pay for some of my first instruments thanks to these jobs.  Now I am lucky to live in a beautiful place surrounded by coconut trees, Strelitzia, Ficus, Phoenix and Washington palms.  Sometimes when I record music, I do it with the door of my house open, where I can see the palm tree that appears on the cover of “Contact”.  I think that plants do not understand pandemics, and they have always been well cared for even during our confinement.  This image is a tribute to those plants that brought peace and tranquility to my life.

Contact
by Pepo Galán & Sita Ostheimer
LP / Digital
12/11/2020

This is Pepo's and Sita's first debut album as a true collaborative effort under both artists' names. Contact is in appreciation and gratefulness of their creative, ever growing partnership.

Pepo Galán and Sita Ostheimer have collaborated in one way or another since 2015. Pepo composed music and furnished accompanied arrangements for Sita's dance creations and Sita recorded her delicate vocals for several of his solo albums.

Written and produced by Pepo Galán
Pepo Galán: Piano, Synth, Voice, Guitar & Field Recordings
Sita Ostheimer: Lyrics and Voice
Lee Yi: Synth, Cello, Additional Guitar & Effects
Macarena Montesinos: Additional Cello on 'Distance'
Recorded between Berlin and Málaga
Mastered at Black Knoll Studio (NY) by Rafael Anton Irisarri
Photography by Pepo Galán
Layout, design & assemblage by zakè
--
© Past Inside the Present
This is PITP-V028 | MMXX
PITP.bandcamp.com
pastinsidethepresent.com