After recording mariachi and dub interpretations of his work with Animal Collective’s Panda Bear, Sonic Boom’s Peter Kember has kept his collaborative streak going with a new holiday record he created with Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips, the figures behind Luna and Dean & Britta. Released last Friday via Carpark, A Peace of Us collects 14 carols and covers of other holiday-themed cuts ranging from Lennon/Ono’s “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” to a “Peace on Earth / Little Drummer Boy” medley created by David Bowie and Bing Crosby for a TV special duet in the ’70s.
While the snow certainly wasn’t falling in LA, where they recorded their “Neighborhoods” set, Wareham and Phillips performed their cover of Purple Mountains’ “Snow Is Falling in Manhattan” from the collection in a friend’s backyard in Highland Park. “When David Berman’s Purple Mountains record came out in the summer of 2019, I emailed David to tell him how much I loved the album, and ‘Snow is Falling in Manhattan’ in particular,” Wareham shares. “He said he’d put me on the list for his upcoming show at the Lodge Room: ‘I have one person on my list for LA—I don’t know anyone!’ We were stunned when he took his life just a few weeks later, and his whole album suddenly read like a long good-bye note.
“Now it’s November 2024, Britta and I are staying with friends in Highland Park, and we shot this video in their backyard. You can hear the sounds of water in their pond. It’s a long way from a snowy Saturday in Manhattan, but that’s what the holidays are like out here.”
Check out the performance below, and listen to A Peace of Us here.
