Pegg & Van Dyke Parks’ Historic Baroque Nouveau
TRACKLIST
Baseball Season
Madre de Dios
No Dice
CREDITS
Songs written by Xander Duell and Van Dyke Parks
String arrangements by Van Dyke Parks
Recorded and mixed by Jesse Johnson
Produced by Jesse Johnson and Xander Duell
Mastered by Al Carlson
Artwork and layout by Jesse Bonnell
Xander Duell: vocals, piano
Jesse Johnson: piano, synth, field recordings, treatments
Blake Fusilier: vocals
Kandy Peak: bass
Perky Sanca: cello
Davin P. Sky: viola
Decca Preys: violin
Adan Skep: violin
Presque Tout: Variations no. 435-514 “Baseball Season” is out now, listen here.
Today, the Brooklyn composer and indie band leader Pegg releases his collaborative suite with Van Dyke Parks. Presque Tout: Variations no. 435-514 “Baseball Season,” is out now via IS NOT MUSIC. Listen to Preque Tout here.
In celebration of the historic collaboration and 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. As a preview, watch Pegg’s live rendition of “The All Golden” from VDP’s 1968 masterpiece Song Cycle. Pegg’s enrapturing rendition of the song premiered on FLOOD Magazine.
“What we created was a new thing altogether,” says Duell. “Some kind of American alchemical glam decay that means something significant but we don’t know what. All we know is we think we opened a hitherto undiscovered door.” He continues, “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 now invite you to walk through that door to experience Presque Tout, or almost everything. 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:
The first movement “Baseball Season” serves as a playful dance between vocals and strings, nothing more, with the violins curling upwards at the same time Duell sings, “I ain’t gonna be tarred and feathered nowwwww / That’s your job, honey!” Equally pastoral and post-apocalyptic, Van Dyke Parks’ percussive arrangements on “Madre de Dios” blur the lines between classical and show tune, with Duell bridging the gap at “I know it feels like a big down.” “No Dice” is the sole composition to have seen the light of day before on Pegg, but only its psychedelia remains on Presque Tout, greatly reimagined from soulful rocker to baroque balladry.
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.”
THE MAKING OF PRESQUE TOUT: VARIATIONS NO. 435-514 “BASEBALL SEASON”
For a release with such a long and pronounced name, Presque Tout surprisingly began with no name, no goal, entirely shapeless—it began with nothing more than a note from an admirer to an admiree. Ever since hearing Song Cycle at age 14, Duell has “practically subsisted medicinally” on the music of Van Dyke Parks. When Duell wrote to his hero with a pile of scrappy demos and a proposal to create and record string arrangements, to his astonishment his hero said yes and picked three he was drawn to most.
While Van Dyke Parks got to work on the west coast, back on the east coast Duell began assembling a community of players to bring these demos to life, eventually sharpening into focus as the Pegg project. While recording their 2024 self-titled album with producers Bartees Strange and Alex Dowling, Duell’s intention was to add Van Dyke Parks’ string arrangements to the mix, but then “Van Dyke overdelivered” laughs Duell. “Bartees and Alex’s vision was so sweeping. As hard as we tried to fit the strings into the album, we eventually would come to realize that they needed their own venue.”
While in Los Angeles performing a theatre production of Pandaemonium by Nichole Canuso and the Early Morning Opera, Duell finally met Van Dyke Parks. After a tour of his studio and a meal at one of his favorite Vietnamese diners, Duell found himself motivated. Like a Jenga puzzle, he began pulling out the foundational blocks of the demos he initially provided to Van Dyke Parks. The more blocks he pulled, the more he realized how much structural integrity there was in the strings alone. Alongside longtime collaborator Jesse Johnson, Duell reworked his contributions to meet his hero at his level, and ultimately found a new venue for “almost everything” from his original batch of songs.
And what a towering, puzzling, and wonderful result we are offered with Presque Tout!