Small Isles released their debut album “The Valley, The Mountains, The Sea” on June 25th via AKP Recordings, an imprint of Dangerbird Records.

Tracklist: 1 – The Concept
2 – Walked From Ruin
3 – I Came as a Faux
4 – Life at One
5 – Fort Wayne
6 – Lake Superior
7 – Maybe We Will
8 – The Plot to Take Clover

The video for the single ‘Life at One’ was done Riley Anderson. About the video Jim Fairchild said: “I had this vague concept of a person facing down their mortality and then finding redemption and purpose. Where Riley took the song was beyond what I’d hoped for. It is heartbreaking in the best possible way, without becoming didactic. He is also making a chopped and screwed version of the video which will serve as a chaptered visual accompaniment for the whole album. Riley’s work brought the whole album to life in a way I’d hoped for but couldn’t have imagined.”

Small Isles is the new instrumental project of guitarist Jim Fairchild (Grandaddy / Modest Mouse / All Smiles) and songwriter/composer Jacob Snider, Small Isles inhabits a rare hypnotic twilight between motion picture music and incandescent cosmic folk. At once a love letter to film soundtracks and a meditative balm for our troubled times, The Valley, The Mountains, The Sea was recorded by Fairchild on a bare-bones mobile rig while on tour with Modest Mouse, in the cracks of time between soundchecks and performances, from city to city, in darkened hotel rooms and over-lit backstage dressing rooms, giving the album a sense of intimacy, of stolen time and weary after show solitude.

This is what Jim Fairchild had to say about Small Isles: “I began writing this album with a vague prompt. I wanted to conceive music that would inspire Ang Lee and Rick Moody to come together and use my work as a mood board for creating a spiritual sequel to The Ice Storm. And then use the album as cues for the score to the movie. I worked on it backstage almost every day during a tour with Modest Mouse. It was a dark time and it was healing to set up my rig and make music as a ritual. I was feeling good about the results, but it wasn’t until Jacob Snider started adding to the songs that they felt as beautiful and evocative as I’d imagined they could. Once Mike Cresswell sent me back the mixes, my favorite songs were the ones Jacob was on. So Small Isles the band was born. Now we have this album and another five-song EP that we’ll start mixing in the next couple of weeks with live strings and a fully formed collaboration between Jacob and me.”

There are no tour dates as of yet for the USofA (or Tijuana).