Slow Marina

Slow Marina make dream pop that moves at the speed of a tide going out. The trio work in long forms, six and seven minutes at a time, and treat the vocal as one instrument among several rather than the thing everything else is arranged around.

They met working nights in the same building, one in a kitchen and two in a rehearsal space downstairs, and started recording because the room was free after two in the morning. That accident set the tone. The early material was made on borrowed equipment with no monitoring to speak of, and the band still mixes at low volume on purpose.

The sound is built from tape delay, an upright piano nobody has tuned in some years, and a drummer who plays behind the beat far enough that new collaborators ask whether it is deliberate. It is.

On record the vocal is often the last thing added and the first thing buried. Lyrics arrive in fragments and repeat until they stop meaning what they meant, which the band treats as the point rather than as an effect.

They play rarely and never as an opener, preferring rooms where the audience is seated and the set can run ninety minutes without a break. A second record is finished and has sat unreleased for most of a year while the three of them argue about the running order.