About Phantogram
Phantogram is an American music duo from Greenwich, New York, formed in 2007 and consisting of multi-instrumentalists and vocalists Sarah Barthel and Josh Carter.
The band define their music as electronic rock, dream pop, electronica and trip hop, and have described their sound as "street beat, psych pop". According to Carter, their music has "lots of rhythms, swirling guitars, spacey keyboards, echoes, airy vocals". Carter and Barthel were inspired by numerous artists including the Beatles, David Bowie, Cocteau Twins, J Dilla, the Flaming Lips, John Frusciante, Serge Gainsbourg, Madlib, Sonic Youth, Yes, Kevin Shields, and Prince.
They write and record in a remote barn in Upstate New York called Harmonie Lodge. The band has released four studio albums , four EPs and 10 singles.
Carter and Barthel have been friends since preschool. In mid-2007, Barthel returned home dissatisfied with pursuing a visual arts degree at Champlain College in Vermont, and Carter returned home after a brief stint in New York City with Grand Habit, an experimental band formed with his older brother, John. The two friends reunited and worked on finishing some of Carter's earlier songwriting ideas, then finally formed the band. They played some live shows, but decided to focus the bulk of their energies on making records.
The duo was originally called Charlie Everywhere and used that name to perform around the Saratoga Springs, New York area and to release two EPs on local label Sub-Bombin Records. Upon signing with UK label Barely Breaking Even on January 26, 2009, they changed their name to Phantogram. Carter suggested the name Phantogram when the band wanted to switch from Charlie Everywhere to "something liked". Upon looking up phantogram, they found that it referred to an optical illusion in which two-dimensional images appear to be three-dimensional, and noted parallels between this meaning and their band and music.
Phantogram's eponymous debut EP was self-released on the CE Records label on May 12, 2009, followed in the same year by another EP, Running From the Cops, issued on BBE. They signed with Barsuk Records in October 2009, after encouragement from Erich Cannon of Portland's Spectre Entertainment, who contacted them after he heard songs on their MySpace page. "We were going to write the record, finish it, and release it as a demo for upstate," explained Barthel. "Then our plan was to move down to New York to do the whole networking and meeting people kind of stuff. And we kind of skipped that whole thing, just because of the internet."
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