Today, the Brooklyn composer and indie band leader Pegg shares a live performance of Van Dyke Parks’ “The All Golden” from his 1968 masterpiece Song Cycle. Pegg’s enrapturing rendition of the song (which premiered yesterday at FLOOD Magazine) comes ahead of his historic collaboration with Van Dyke Parks, Presque Tout: Variations no. 435-514 “Baseball Season,” out September 19 via IS NOT MUSIC. Presave Preque Tout here.

Watch Pegg perform “The All Golden” here.

In celebration of the mini album’s release, Pegg will be performing solo piano works of Van Dyke Parks’ and those from Presque Tout at Tadpole in Brooklyn on September 25. Find more info here.

The three movements within Presque Tout are a fantasia of post-baroque psychedelia, densely packed yet flourishing with life. It’s quick on its feet like a dash to home plate, the mini album’s MVP being the gorgeously arranged strings that captivate you from the proverbial outfield.

Of their collaboration, Pegg said “talking to Van Dyke is like being shot up with antidepressants as you ride a horse through the Swiss Alps in late spring.”

Pegg and Van Dyke Parks will also be featured in IS NOT MUSIC.’s second installment of their zine, the “Legends” issue, alongside L’Rain’s Taja Cheek and Eli Berry discussing the greatness of Beverly Glenn-Copeland, an ode to Q Lazzarus by Jesse Rifkin (author of This Must Be the Place: Music, Community and Vanished Spaces in New York City), Owen Pallett on VDP’s Song Cycle, poetry by the marvelous Margaret Atwood, and more.

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. 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.”