flYINg
Flying’s Sara Magenheimer uses her fictional short stories, paintings
and sculptures to create the mini worlds she sings about on her
band’s debut record, Just-One-Second-Ago-Broken-Eggshell (Mill
Pond Records). So the real story of how she met bandmates Eben Portnoy
and Eliot Krimsky sounds too good to be true. Sara met Eliot during
a winter day in Philly, after building a two-headed dog out of snow. Meeting
Eben was even more surreal. “He started talking and half of his face
was paralyzed,” she says, laughing. Later, she found out he had contracted
Bell’s Palsy while visiting Mexico and their second meeting was no less
strange. “By then his face wasn’t paralyzed, but when we met up, his head
was wrapped in a bloody bandage. Eben was supposed to go to work
that morning, but he got in a pretty bad bike accident. So he ended up
being able to get coffee with me,” she recalls. “We’ve been hanging out
ever since.” Happy accidents also populate their album, where found instruments
and incidental noises give each song a warm depth. Tracks were
recorded in fields, barns and on beaches. Even the howling guard dogs that
live next to Eben and Sara’s Brooklyn loft provide guest vocals. The band
loves using disparate, unique sounds to color their songs, but not all of their
favorite noises made it onto the album, like the gutted piano they found
on the street. “There were sticks on the ground and we were just hitting it
and making these amazing percussive, resonating tones. I don’t know,” she
says, regretfully. “Maybe somehow we’ll still get to use it.” >>>JESSICA SUAREZ
26 newmusic • www.cmj.com