Maximal Music Sync is extremely pleased to welcome English singer-songwriter Ralegh Long to our roster! 

Ralegh Long released his debut album Hoverance to critical acclaim in 2015. Leaving his adopted London, Long returned to his childhood home to write an album of singular grace and simplicity, steeped in natural imagery and "Spooky pastoralism" (MOJO). Hoverance and its follow-up E.P We Are in the Fields (2016) won praise from The Guardian for their “twilit ambience and demented beauty” and from Sky Arts as "calling to mind the atmosphere of Nick Drake". Both records received support from Spotify as well as from BBC6 Music presenters Lauren Laverne, Guy Garvey and Gideon Coe.

His second album, Upwards of Summer, was released in June 2017 and won the HMUK Emerging Artists Award. CLASH declared it "the sound of an artist revitalised and brimming with enthusiasm". Written during a time of personal change, when Long was unsure if he was going to continue making music, and recorded with his touring band, Upwards of Summer is a revelation. The somber string and woodwind arrangements of Hoverance are nowhere to be seen; the melodicism of his debut is instead fused with the jangle of chorus guitars and anthemic hooks in a thrillingly confident return. The album has received acclaim from Elton John, as well as support from Spotify and UNCUT, who likened it to R.E.M and Beck's Sea Change.

In January 2018, Long released a new single, the fragile, reflective, and minimalist "Am I Home", which made Apple Music's Singer/Songwriter A-List, as well as Spotify's 'The Most Beautiful Songs in the World'. He followed this in March with "Super Blue Moon", which debuted on Spotify's New Music Friday and Apple's Best of the Week worldwide, and in June with the intimate "Where You Are", which landed on Apple's Singer/Songwriter A-List as well as Spotify's flagship folk playlist 'Lost in the Woods'.

We're so psyched to welcome Connecticut-based electronic/synth-pop artist Living Phantoms to the Maximal Music Sync family of artists and songwriters! 

Living Phantoms is the solo project from American composer, producer, and audio engineer Will Benoit, who has been recording music for 18 years and counting. Since co-founding independent artist collective Radar Recordings in 2001, he has spent the past decade exploring music through touring and making records as singer and guitarist for Constants, as well as production work and touring with artists like Ellie Goulding, Caspian, and Junius. He loves to write songs and make noise, and enjoys nothing more than when the two magically coalesce.

With an arsenal of analog synthesizers, drum machines and effects, “the one time metal head and Jesu associate serenely slowdives into shoegaze” (Spin.com) with the debut full length from Living Phantoms. Since the project’s inception 3 years ago, producer Will Benoit has released a series of remixes for artists like Ellie Goulding and Bad Rabbits, and also explored new sonic territory with remixes for underground luminaries such as Caspian and Rosetta.

After a short run cassette release in 2013, Benoit set out to define his sound; a dark, but often uplifting journey through lo-fi 80’s inspired grooves and the dense sonic textures that have become his signature. Recorded and mixed using analog gear entirely at his own solar powered The Radar Studio, there is a hypnotic weight and depth to Living Phantoms that “staggers the ears as well as the heart” (The Onion AV Club).

We're thrilled to announce the addition of outlaw country rockers Black Mountain Whiskey Rebellion to the Maximal Music Sync roster! 

Founded by multi-award-winning producer/guitarist and primary songwriter Mitch Merrett who has gathered his long time musical friends and peers in Mike Little, Erik Dylan, Corbett Frasz, and Greg Carroll to create a musical awakening that walks the line of boundless melodic prowess and raw unapologetic grass roots truth.

Together combining a fascination with the history of the North American moonshiner and love of Southern power chord guitar rock into a collection of fictional smoky backwoods musical tales, the result is an album that looks inward and speaks from the soul with tracks that are dark and brooding, complete with lyrics abundant in grit and uncompromising in their delivery.

We're over the moon to announce that Seattle band The Gods Themselves are the newest addition to the Maximal Music Sync roster! 

The Gods Themselves are a disco punk band from Seattle, WA. Formed in 2014, the foursome craft modern dance rock songs evocative of the no-wave and new romantic movements of the early ’80s.

Vocalist/guitarist Astra Elane, vocalist/guitarist Dustin Patterson, bassist Cory Foster, and drummer Larry Joireman are longtime musicians whose callings were revealed in this collaboration. Exuding art-punk bravado, the band fashions illustrious club grooves mixed with seductive melodies. Raw angular guitars shimmer atop disco undertones as provocative lyrics by Elane and Patterson add tales of sexual encounters and self-confidence.

TGT releases its new EP Glamour and Grime on June 15, 2018. Check out “Marilyn Monroe”, their first single from the EP, out now on Spotify. The four-song EP comes on the heels of their 2017 album Be My Animal, featuring the anti-gentrification song “Tech Boys”. Paste Magazine says, “This track unsuspectingly crept into my head and it refuses to leave!” The catchy Seattle anthem has captured many a cheer and ear, including television personality Anthony Bourdain, who invited the band to appear on his show Parts Unknown. In the “Seattle” episode, TGT made their exciting international television debut. 

Maximal Music Sync is ecstatic to welcome Seattle-based hip-hop musician and songwriter Grieves to our roster! 

When asked if he always knew he’d end up being a rapper, Benjamin Laub—better known as Grieves—can only laugh. “Oh no, not really,” he says, “I was in bands and stuff, but I grew up listening mainly to Punk stuff. It wasn’t until I got a little older that Hip-Hop really started to happen for me.” When Grieves first heard artists like Mobb Deep and Wu-Tang Clan, he remembers being drawn to their sound. “Hearing all the samples and stuff from records that I heard my dad play when I was a kid... You start to hear the connections. When I discovered people like Atmosphere, it was like hearing somebody speak their truth in a way that related to me. That’s when I first started to think about Hip-Hop as a way to really talk about what was happening in my life. Hard to believe that now, over a decade later, that’s actually what I’m still doing.”

On Running Wild, Grieves’ fifth proper full-length, the Seattle-based musician manages to balance the dueling impulses that fuel both his live shows and his previous releases: the need to cut loose and the need to vent. Grieves wants to have a good time while also keeping shit real and honest. While previous efforts like 2011’s Together/Apart and 2014’s Winter & The Wolves might have leaned heavily in the direction of darkness—taking on subjects like addiction, heartbreak, and poverty—the new record introduces some much-needed levity to the proceedings. “I remember a review of one of my records where they were like, ‘This guy sounds like he's hella intense and really shitty to hang out with.’ I'm like, ‘What the fuck?’ It's actually the opposite. I wanted this record to reflect that a little more.”

Recorded in Stockholm alongside Swedish producer Chords (aka rapper Jens Eric Resch Thomason), the fifteen tracks on Running Wild do exactly what the album title would imply. Tracks like “Gutz” and “No Sleep” are classic Grieves ruminations on anxiety and romantic bust-ups (“I think about you and say f--- you, then you come over and I f--- you” he raps on the former), but the record—which features only a handful of guests, all from Seattle—stretches out in a number of surprising directions. Tracks like “Faded” and “RX” experiment with fluttering trap beats, while songs like “What it Dew” and album-closer “5,000 Miles” offer the rich guitar tones and humming organs that one might expect on a classic soul record. It’s a kind of openness—both sonically and thematically—that Laub attributes to how and where the record was made.

“I flew from Seattle to Stockholm on basically zero sleep,” he recalls, “Suddenly I’m there, my first day, and I’m immediately stepping into the studio, which felt like walking into a whole other planet. I'm jet lagged. I'm vulnerable. I'm there, but I'm kind of not. And that's where some of the best songs came from. I didn't have the energy to fight myself on anything. Instead of retreating into my own head, I got completely out of it. Songs like “Gutz” are things that I probably never would have done—or could have done—on my own. If something felt weird to me, or uncomfortable, Chords would push me further in that direction. I needed that. Any time I was like, "Nope. I don't think I can get away with that" he’d say, "That sounds like a perfect reason to give it a try."

At a time when the notion of the “album” is often summarily ditched in favor records that are little more than a collection of previously released singles, Running Wild is very much an album, and intentionally so. “I really wanted this to be a real record,” says Laub, “I wanted it to work front to back.”

“I've been touring for over ten years at this point,” he says. “People have seen my show. They get it. They get who I am as a person and they get who I am as an artist. They get both sides of the spectrum. They get the serious and they get the light heartedness. Until now I haven't been comfortable with releasing a record that divulges that, that gives what you're getting at the live experience and what you have come to expect from the records, all in one. The whole idea is to just give people a more authentic experience of me. I’m not just the brooding emotional fuckup from that old record review, the one with no sense of humor who doesn’t sound fun to hang out with. This record is for all the fans who’ve come out to the shows, for everyone that I've worked with. For so many years I felt like, in order to have a career, I could only show this one little part of me. I don’t want to do that anymore.”

We're so excited to welcome L.A.-based pop/rocker Mikey Wax to the Maximal Music Sync Roster! 

While driving to a recording session in Los Angeles, rising pop/rock artist Mikey Wax began creating a new infectious melody in his head and immediately pulled over his car. He knew this would be the song he'd write to perform for his soon-to-be-wife the night of their wedding. Fast forward to the June wedding, the completed song, titled "Big Little Life," is immediately resonating, with the music video being featured on VEVO's 'Incoming Pop' playlist reaching millions of VEVO subscribers, and the song featured on Spotify's New Music Friday in eight countries. "Even when it changes, even when we make it, all I need is room for you. Let's build a big little life". The song describes a relationship between a couple that started out with nothing and slowly started building their life together. The music video has a very genuine way of expressing that despite not having many material things, their love is enough to keep their relationship growing.

Always inspired by those around him, Mikey's prior uplifting single "Helium" was written during a challenging time, when someone very close to him was battling cancer. Helium immediately resonated with one million Spotify streams, a feature in a large Hollister clothing ad campaign, a placement in an ABC TV promo for the ABC app, and a feature in YouTube sensation DevinSupertramp's "Best Year Ever" viral video. Wax's other single "You Lift Me Up" attained over 8 million Spotify streams and was placed in a Keeping Up With Kardashians promo commercial, as well as 50 NBA games on FOX Sports, MTV's Real World, and the NCAA March Madness on TBS. His electronic pop single "Spaceman" was featured in a worldwide Nike Swim ad campaign, while his marriage equality anthem "Love Always Wins" was featured in the promo commercial for the highly anticipated E! TV series "I Am Cait" starring Caitlyn Jenner.

Wax's songs continue to connect with fans around the globe. He has grown his social media fanbase to over one million followers, and has performed numerous tours including shows supporting Jason Mraz, Parachute, Rachel Platten, Jon McLaughlin, Matt Wertz, Ryan Cabrera, Tyler Hilton and Andy Grammer, to name a few. And when he's not playing in front of a few hundred people at a nightclub, Mikey plays intimate house concerts right in his fans own living room. He has completed dozens of exclusive house concerts, allowing his fans to connect to his music in an unforgettable way.

With the buzz continuing to grow, Mikey has been recognized by iHeart Radio as an "Artist To Watch", while KSL.com says Mikey "is one of the most promising rock/pop singer-songwriters out right now". The Billboard Heatseekers charting artist has been featured on many outlets including the Ryan Seacrest homepage, YouTube homepage where he garnered 500,000 views overnight, Huffington Post, USA Today, AOL Build, and RantLifeStyle, who says Mikey is a musician you may have "never heard of who deserves a grammy", calling him a "piano prodigy" and "social media phenomenon". You could have already caught his music in the latest United Airlines ad, So You Think You Can Dance, ABC Freeform's Switched At Birth & Pretty Litttle Liars, or on the mobile app Sing! Karaoke by Smule (where he sings along with his 275,000 app followers), but if not, be sure to catch him on tour.

We're thrilled to welcome Ceiling Spirits, the cinematic instrumental project from Milwaukee-based composer and guitarist Mario Quadracci, to the Maximal Music Sync roster!  

The story of Ceiling Spirits ironically begins in a basement. For years guitarist Mario Quadracci would steal any moment he could to retreat to his cellar studio and try to coax the sound he was hearing in his head through his amplifiers. It took a while, but slowly, frustratingly slowly, something began to click. Without other musicians to lean on, Quadracci figured out how to create an ensemble of timbres using just guitar, effects and unconventional playing techniques. From the beginning his aim was to create a musical force that could be alternately ferocious and elegiac, soaring and sparse, but always decentralized in focus from its source: himself. Adopting the moniker Ceiling Spirits helped, but it was the screenings of self­-produced films at performances that completed the illusion. The films allowed for an exploration of sound’s ability to define the emotional, spatial and thematic qualities of images. The music and visuals became intricately linked. But that all changed when storied record producer, Gareth Jones, who had seen a video of a Ceiling Spirits performance on YouTube, offered to help turn the music from the live show into an album. Quadracci jumped at the chance to work with Jones. He was also curious to see if his compositions could be made to retain their emotional and thematic content removed from the films they were designed to accompany. The recording of Ceiling Spirits's self-­titled debut LP spanned two years and three countries, finishing with mastering at Abbey Road Studios in early 2018. The music does not fit neatly into the traditional categories of genre, but has hints of classical minimalism, post rock, electronic and ambient music sprinkled throughout.

Maximal Music Sync is delighted to announce the addition of multitalented composer and producer AO Tøndra to our artist roster! 

The 2018 EP Quintet is the first artist release from AO Tøndra, a.k.a. London producer Aidan O'Brie, best known (until now...) for his collaborative work with London duo IDE, as well as stunning productions for artists including FOUR ("Tell Me in the Morning"), Richard Walter ("July Bones", "Awards Night") and Tesserac (various tracks on new album Sonder).

Quintet is a collection of five perfectly crafted, cinematically pitched ambient pieces, calling to mind Jon Hopkin and Helio, at their most horizontal. Each track, wonderfully slow moving and long form, is rich with emotion and sonic brilliance, offering the listener the chance to drift to other parts of their own world.

AO Tøndra: "I’ve always enjoyed music which includes or experiments with ambient elements for a long time - Oceansiz, Trentemolle, etc. - but discovering Brian En got me interested in ‘purely’ ambient music, music which could have the same emotional impact as more traditional songs or compositions, while not necessarily following the same melodic or rhythmic rules. I originally wrote these five pieces as a Christmas gift for my girlfriend - it was never intended to be heard by a wider audience, but she suggested I release it."

We're very happy to give a warm welcome to the newest addition to the Maximal Music Sync roster, Fairhazel!

Though only just entering his twenties, Fairhazel has already lived a frenetic life, constantly on the move since the start; from the cobbled streets of Paris, to the vastness of Cape Town, through to his current home of London, each place has helped to form his view of the world and shaped his unique and powerful music. Every city, every street and every person he has encountered had a story to tell and to retell these stories through song is what Fairhazel sets out to do.

After being accepted to the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston at the start of 2016, he experienced a whole new culture and with it experiences and meetings that would inspire a new sound; a dark, rich folk music drawing lyrical and melodic influence from roots music, jazz and psychedelia, creating something raw and pure, a sound entirely of his own.

We're so excited to announce the addition of eclectic New York-based indie rockers Jesus on the Mainline to the Maximal Music Sync roster! 

The band's founding members and unlikely collaborators Andrew Neesley and Tim Emmerick met in a random encounter in New York and soon began writing music together, locking in a unique partnership that seems to complete each writer. With the traditional song "Jesus On The Mainline" popping up repeatedly in the mystical computer algorithm on Andrew’s feed, the band name was chosen and now permanently represents purposeful connection with the source, regardless of differences in background.

Award-winning trumpeter Andrew Neesley has a Masters in Jazz Composition, and cut his teeth composing and arranging for Afro-Cuban big bands, including the GRAMMY-nominated Bobby Sanabria Big Band. Andrew has recorded or performed with a wide range of artists including Lady Gaga, The Roots, Chris Botti, James Taylor, Christian McBride, Randy Brecker, and Ray Barreto. He has appeared in venues large and not as large, from Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center to The Jazz Standard and Joe’s Pub.

Tim Emmerick is a songwriter and musician originally from Buffalo, New York.  As a child he studied voice with beloved Western New York music teacher Barbara Wagner and started gigging in local bars and coffee houses at 14. Tim earned his Masters of Music in Songwriting from Bath Spa University in Bath, UK. As a songwriter he has written and recorded with artists in the US and Europe and has landed placements with major brands, including Microsoft and Converse. Tim is a mainstay on the New York indie rock scene and has toured extensively in the US, Canada, and UK, including appearances with artists at South By Southwest, North by Northeast, CMJ and Brooklyn’s Northside Festival.

Jesus On The Mainline begins with this duo, but expands to a fifteen piece group of New York’s finest young musicians. Inclusion and collaboration make the band more than hired guns – the lush sounds on their debut album, The Morning Bell, are the result of a tight connection between members of a large ensemble – bringing Neesley’s experience to the center. Yet above everything in the room are the SONGS, and this deference on the part of each member creates a tight focus throughout the album. This is not a big band rambling through the repertoire, nor is it a couple of writers who hired out the finishing touches – this is a collection of players paying meticulous homage to the power of a song – times ten. Of course, when it’s time to hit the stage, the big band cuts loose in a funky explosion of sound.

"The Morning Bell is Jesus On The Mainline’s debut full-length record and is our first opportunity to truly fly our flag as songwriters and record makers. As a band, we have been fortunate to receive great support for our live shows, and the stage has been our home. But we also love albums that stand on their own merit, and that is what we strove for with The Morning Bell. The pool of musical influences on this album is massive and includes everything from gospel traditionals to John Coltrane to the Alabama Shakes to Abbey Road. As a 15-piece band, JOTM already has a huge palette of sounds, and we’ve combined our many sounds in new ways on this record. We took deep dives into the abyss of guitar tone. We geeked out for six months straight after finding a 1960s Echoplex tape delay in the trash. We relished how much better a vintage Juno synth sounds than a software plug-in. All of these experiences made an impact on the album. Making The Morning Bell has been an awakening for us, and the process affirmed our commitment to discovery and embracing the unknown."