Today, the Brooklyn composer and indie bandleader Pegg shares the title track for the upcoming project, Presque Tout: Variations no. 435-514 “Baseball Season,” A fated collaboration with the legendary songwriter and arranger Van Dyke Parks. Along with the track we get a deeply contemplative, mind-igniting video that’d be right at home in a dark chamber of a modern art museum: with a welcome tediousness indebted to 1970s process video art that makes you sit with it, a fitting backdrop ticks away to the gorgeous Gershwin-esque slapstick of this historic collaboration. Listen to / watch “Baseball Season” here.

“Baseball Season” serves as a playful dance between strings arranged by Van Dyke Parks and vocals, nothing more, with the violins curling upwards at the same time Pegg’s Xander Duell sings “now” during “I ain’t gonna be tarred and feathered nowwwww / That’s your job, honey!” Co-producer Jesse Johnson’s treatments to the mix become more pronounced, eventually giving way to an ethereal second movement, equally pastoral and post-apocalyptic.

Of the movement, Pegg says, “Baseball is life. Decisions made in baseball can affect the rest of the season, a microcosm to the decisions you make in life. ‘Baseball Season’ is about choosing your proverbial horse wisely, delicately.” 

Watch the official video for “Baseball Season” here.

Presque Tout is currently available as a limited-edition 500-piece puzzle, accompanied by downloads of the project (out now), as well as a 6-panel digipak CD with a 4-panel insert (out July 11). Presque Tout will arrive digitally September 19 via IS NOT MUSIC, preorder a CD via Bandcamp or your favorite independent record shop here.

Last month, the Presque Tout project came to life at a Listening Lounge & Puzzle Party at Secret Riso Club in Brooklyn (see a glimpse here). There, following a discussion with journalist Jesse Rifkin (author of This Must Be the Place: Music, Community and Vanished Spaces in New York City), Pegg announced CD and digital release plans.

Previously released movement “No Dice” is a fleeting and festive springtime fantasia with a low, light viscosity; it’s quick on its feet, like a dash to home plate. It’s the sole Presque Tout composition to have previously seen the light of day on Pegg’s Bartees Strange-produced debut album… but only its psychedelia remains, greatly reimagined from soulful rocker to post-baroque balladry. While “No Dice” looks outward with jollity, “Baseball Season” goes inwards toward darker spaces.

Pegg is the highly collaborative Brooklyn project helmed by Xander Duell. Pegg’s self-titled debut was released in August 2024, described by Gold Flake Paint as “reaching for something glittering just out of reach, and it all swells together alongside a classic-NYC-indie-rock heartbeat.” Pegg was produced by acclaimed indie artist Bartees Strange and award-winning Irish composer Alex Dowling.

Van Dyke Parks is a legendary arranger, composer, performer, and producer who has worked with artists ranging from Joanna Newsom to Bob Dylan, Skrillex to Haruomi Hosono, and most famously, with the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson on the “lost” album Smile. As Duell says, “Van Dyke Parks is on a short list of the most important names in American music of the 20th century. Talking to Van Dyke is like being shot up with antidepressants as you ride a horse through the Swiss Alps in late spring. I always considered him my musical godfather and I haven’t stopped pinching myself since the moment I heard he agreed to work with me.”