Eliot Rose began recording music in 1999 under the name the Scientifics. In those early days he was a lo-fi Casio purist, singing songs about physics and love with heavy mid-range and lots of tape hiss. Over the course of the past decade Eliot walked the Earth, settled in Portland, and outgrew his old stage name, and in the process his melodic pop songs emerged from their chrysalis of dross. His 2008 album The Calculated Dream was a peppy affair full of Eno-esque tunes about longing, travel, and death, buoyed up on on layers of Soviet-era synthesizers, African thumb pianos, sampled beats, and melodica. It was named one of the local albums of the year by the Portland Mercury, but Eliot was not content to be a local star in a global age, and shortly after the album's release he moved to the Bay Area to be closer to the epicenter of the tech boom, the earthquakes, and the dawn of a new universal consciousness. His newer material, which is slated for release at the dawning of the next calendrical age, moves between tender acoustic moments and ecstatic dance spasms, delivered on stage with a mix of live accompaniment, guided visualizations, and pure radiant vibes.

As singer and songwriter of the Stopgaps, The Meek, and Trust (and countless other bands that predate them), Patrick O’Malley has been writing, recording, and performing music since the mid-Nineties. He began attempting to be a “Jacques Brel of Southern California”, writing angsty but melodic songs about isolation, suburban sprawl, wage-labor, insurance scams, and healthcare reform against the backdrop of a furiously strummed guitar, many of which later appeared on The Meek EP (2002) and the full-length A Whole Different Country (2003). A name change, louder drums, and an electric guitar led him to some of his most realized songs which surfaced under Trust (2008), where his voice began to show shades of singer Scott Walker and jazz vocalist Johnny Hartman while showcasing his witty, occasionally off-kilter lyrics. He quit the band thing in 2010 and released a solo debut Looking Over (2011) which showed the influence of Bowie and I’m Your Man-era Leonard Cohen and ranges from nostalgia-hued sepia tinted miniatures like “Old VHS Tape”, to the opaque Kafka-esque “…And the Crowd Cheered Verdict”, to straight up rockers like “Those Were the Days (We Loved the Best)”.