Days Between Stations are releasing their fourth album, “Perpetual Motion Machines (Music For A Film),” on November 29. Just released this weekend is the music video “Seeds” at https://youtu.be/5kmLDoapIkg.
The music video for “Seeds” features artist Jean-Paul Bourdier at work, altering landscapes, coloring bodies, marking up film frames, playing with manufactured items to see how they influence visuals.
“Perpetual Motion Machines (Music For Film)” is the result of DBS founding members keyboardist Oscar Fuentes Bills and guitarist Sepand Samzadeh working on the music for a documentary film about Jean-Paul Bourdier, himself, in the mid-2010s. As the music reached completion, the group was offered the opportunity to release their music as a “proper” album. Sepand says, “Jean Paul’s artwork was our muse, and we scored the music to pictures and to existing films.”
One song, "Being," felt unfinished at the time. Oscar had written a melody that lent itself to vocals, and “we based them around the general concept of existence and trying to inject Jean Paul’s poetic philosophy.” Ultimately, the lyrics came from a more personal place, “this is what Jean-Paul’s art inspired us to do, and we let the music speak for itself. Pink Floyd backup vocalist Durga McBroom sings on “Being,” which will be released as a video on November 29, the same day as the album.
Produced by Navon Weisberg (The Voice engineer, Puddle of Mudd), he helmed the project “as a fan. I removed the technical hurdles and allowed Sepand and Oscar to focus their energy on the music, allowing their emotions to be captured.”
The album is dedicated to the memory of "Big" Bill Kaylor who engineered early sessions of “Perpetual Motion Machines” and worked on the group’s second album, “In Extremis.”
Formed exactly 20 years ago in Los Angeles, Sepand and Oscar named the band after Steve Erickson’s novel “Days Between Stations.” The Pineapple Thief’s Bruce Soord inspired the band to work on their music after he used some of Sepand and Oscar’s musical experiments as the basis for “Saturday” on The Pineapple Thief’s “12 Stories Down” album. The duo continued to work with a range of musicians on what became their first release, “Days Between Stations,” in 2007. Their 2012 recording “In Extremis” was produced by Yes’ Billy Sherwood. In 2020 they released “Giants,” which included vocals from Durga McBroom on “Witness the End of the World” and voted as Prog Magazine’s Track of the Week.
The band has a history of music in films-dating back to “Radio Song” (from the debut album) licensed in the independent film “Young, Single & Angry” in 2006 and then in 2023 in “Paul & Trisha: The Art of Fluidity,” now featured on Apple Movies. They created the score for a short Mexican movie, “Y Recibir Tu Aliento” in 2017.
Perpetual Motion Machines (Music For A Film)
1. Waltz for the Dead (1:53)
2. Proof of Life (2:49)
3. Seeds (2:39)
4. Unearth (4:21)
5. Intermission 3 (0:52)
6. Stone Faces (3:15)
7. Paradigm Lost (6:24)
8. Ascend (3:14)
9. Being (featuring Durga McBroom) (9:00)
Pre-Order CD or vinyl at www.daysbetweenstations.com/product-category/perpetual-motion-machines/