SUN004: Central Heat Exchange "Central Heat Exchange"

In collaboration with Citrus City Records and Birthday Cake Media, we’re pleased to announce that we’re releasing Central Heat Exchange’s debut album on September 10th.

What started off as a collaborative experiment in the early days of the pandemic has blossomed into a full length album complete with nearly twenty collaborators, mostly from the Central Time Zone.

The band includes our very own Jake Stolz, along with Paul Stolz (Varsity, Pool Holograph, Discus), Santiago RD (Daphne Tunes), and Adam Soloway (Living Hour), featuring design work by Clare Byrne. The cover design incorporates an original painting by the amazing Boston-based artist Nina Stolz Bellucci.

Each vinyl record will come with a risograph printed lyric zine, designed and printed at Sunroom Studios. Read more about the band below and pre-order your vinyl copy today!

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People don’t talk on the phone all that much anymore. When we’re apart, we text and DM — ping ponging back and forth, sending and replying. A perfectly rendered circuit. But if you call someone, and you get their voicemail, there is no certainty that you will ever get a reply. You may go on forever, missing each other, etching thoughts and ideas into the ether—having a conversation without speaking, directly, to anybody. This kind of liminal conversation is the essence of Central Heat Exchange - a new band of close-but-distant friends.

Central Heat Exchange is the sound of four co-writers and a deep list of special features (Sun June, Lala Lala, Fran, + more) scattered by distance, time, and circumstance. Their self-titled debut — out September 10th via Birthday Cake Media/Citrus City Records/Sunroom Records — is a pastiche of dream-like memories and rich melodies, unabashedly harkening back to the sounds of early-aughts indie heroes like Stereolab, Yo La Tengo, Broken Social Scene, and Neutral Milk Hotel. Recorded in separate bedrooms across North America’s central time zone and mostly mixed together by Ben Lumsdaine (Major Murphy, Varsity, Kevin Krauter, Amy O, EZTV), the album reconstructs a sense of communal possibility during a time when the very idea of community—especially in music—was dislocated, wrenched from its foundation in venues and practice spaces and, like so much else during this pandemic, deposited online.

The members of Central Heat Exchange met at shows over the years. They were friendly but not really close friends. They didn’t live anywhere near each other and it seemed like this pattern would continue: do some shows sporadically and reconnect every few years. But in the spring of 2020, after being locked down for the better part of three months, Jake wrote and recorded a piece of a song, sent that song fragment to Santi who recorded some vocal melodies, which were then passed to Adam and Paul to thicken it up with keys, bass, and guitars.

This happened ten more times in different iterations—each track recorded remotely, at home, using whatever gear and personnel was handy. Lumsdaine took all their rough-edged ideas and stitched/mixed them together into a cohesive collection of rockers, feelers and in-betweeners. “For most of the songs,” Santi writes, “it was a refreshing experience to build songs as instrumentals first, taking a texture-forward approach to songwriting before figuring where the lyrical content would go. Each blank track file felt like a new and refreshing place to escape to creatively.”

Whether you’re looking for an anthemic driving jam to listen to on a trip, or a midtempo acoustic bop to cry yourself to sleep to, Central Heat Exchange is the batch of fuzzy indie pop we’ve all been missing in our lives for the last decade.

Limited edition green vinyl and blue tapes available through Citrus City’s Bandcamp.