Snow Palms

Named after a painting by his late father depicting downtown Los Angeles in a freak blizzard, David Sheppard first conceived Snow Palms as a vehicle for similarly evocative juxtapositions, pitching vaguely ‘Eastern’ flavoured mallet instruments (metallophones, glockenspiels, xylophones, marimbas, etc.) against ostensibly occidental chamber orchestra arrangements, fluid classical guitar arpeggios and subtle electronics to create a kind of sono-geographic music – shimmering miniature landscapes in sound, evocative of secret places, enclaves of transcendence, terra incognita…

In 2017 Sheppard began experimenting in the studio with electronic producer Matt Gooderson, late of Wall of Sound recording artists Infadels. Gooderson, already navigating far from that band’s energy-blast electro-rock and brimming with renewed creative curiosity, was finding a way back to music-making that satisfied his more esoteric penchants and bonded with Sheppard over a mutual love of analogue electronica, minimalism, in all its forms, and the theoretical worlds of Brian Eno, the subject of Sheppard’s acclaimed 2008 biography, On Some Faraway Beach.

It helped that he and Sheppard cohered on contextual matters, equally, regarding Snow Palms as an outlier of or conduit to a wider philosophical outlook: the music’s ‘between the genres’ orientation and transportive tendencies analogous with a mutual dissatisfaction with the over-consuming, over-surveilled Google Earth world.