American Primitive

Snowy mountains vs. palm trees. Vanilla ice-cream vs. Bavarian sausage. A couple of images that spring to mind when imagining a musical collaboration between Walkabouts front man Chris Eckman and Tosca-boss Rupert Huber. But the music speaks for itself. Once you hear the opening bars of their unusual project Long, you quickly learn that apparent opposites have actually changed into an organic symbiosis of two human beings thinking alike. Their debut album "American Primitive" has a long and winding history that reflects the name of the project - Long. It was eight years ago that Eckman and Huber first met in a chalet at a friend's party. When these thoroughbred musicians found a guitar and piano there was no holding them back. While jamming they found there was hardly any boundary between American folk and European electronica. It took three years for the two workaholics to meet again in Vienna, when Chris Eckman did a vocal part for the Tosca-tune "John Lee Huber". Both enjoyed the collaboration and started to jam more regularly, sending files back and forth and thus pieced an album together, neither folk nor electronica, but a merging of both styles in a unique way.