Belle Mare is a collaboration between songwriters Amelia Bushell and Thomas Servidone. The duo met at an open mic in Brooklyn during the winter of 2012, and recorded an EP that was released the following year. With the addition of Tara Rook (Keyboards), Rob Walbourne (Drums) and Gary Atturio (Bass), Belle Mare performed a live video session at Manhattan’s Electric Lady Studio, at which they caught the attention of Grammy-winner Tom Elmhirst and Ben Baptie. Elmhirst offered the band his studio at Electric Lady to record with Baptie as producer, and began work on what will be their debut full-length album, with sessions spanning the better part of two years.
While preserving the foundations of their songwriting and maintaining the stark minimalism of their previous work, Belle Mare’s first album is new territory for the band. Compositionally diverse arrangements, and instrumentation more in line with their live performances, resulted in a far more expansive sound. Although the results are dramatically different, the sincerity and fragility of Bushell’s voice resonates distinctly throughout the album, as do the themes of longing and the passage of time.
Prior to their full length, Belle Mare released the aforementioned EP, The Boat of the Fragile Mind in April of 2013. A collection of eight songs described as “spaciously eerie” by SPIN. The EP was written and recorded by the duo in the modest confines of Servidone’s Brooklyn apartment. It is a strikingly different experience from the Electric Lady recordings, conjuring “a sense of timeless unbeholden to a specific time.”
Languorous and lost blissfully in a daydream, “What Haven’t I Done” is a flickering escape and the pristine latest single from Brooklyn’s Belle Mare. It’s a pastel cloud whose generous expanse shifts from misty to precise in chromatic turns. You can stream the track right now on their Soundcloud page, and you can find each of their previous releases by visiting their Bandcamp page.
The Fat Angel Sings 