At Dusk

15 guitars, 10 years, 4 practice spaces, 3 tours, 2 tapes, untold numbers of private jokes and countless pots of tea since they first began playing music together as sound-struck teenagers, Portland-based trio At Dusk are calling it a day and walking away into the sunset. But not without first releasing their fourth, final and most accomplished album – Small Light.A wistful collection of 20 miniaturist, largely up-tempo, nearly percussionless prog-folk songs written in a private musical language informed by the American DIY underground, Afro-Brazilian pop, and Downtown music, Small Light is cast in the bittersweet glow of approaching endings, closure found, and promises kept.Written and recorded in the band’s living room over the course of two and a half years during which the band came to the knowledge that it would be their last album, Small Light marks a profound but fluid stylistic shift from At Dusk’s three previous albums of increasingly frenetic and angular sun-kissed post-punk. By trading in overdriven amplifiers for finger-picked acoustics, battering-ram drums for spare percussion, leap-frogging group vocals for crystalline single melodies, and sprawling, byzantine song structures for focused, short-form arrangements, the trio of Greg Borenstein, Cary Clarke and Will Hattman imposed a new set of compositional constraints on themselves. By design, the new set of tools forced them to slough off old habits and find something fresh, untried and new in a decade-long musical partnership. What remained the same was the unwaveringly collaborative nature of the writing process, the urgency and sophistication at the core of the songs, and the friendship and shared youth of show-going and record-hunting that birthed the band to begin with.With Borenstein headed to New York to begin graduate school, Clarke moving to Seattle to join his longtime girlfriend, and Hattman beginning new musical endeavors in Portland, At Dusk has reached a natural endpoint, leaving behind not only a legacy in recordings and legendarily loud live shows, but in a vibrant Portland music community they helped champion as co-founders of the non-profit organization PDX Pop Now! "In spite of the fact that this is sort of an autumnal moment for us, it's a spectacularly lucky thing to make music you care about and believe in with your best friends for a decade," says Clarke. "We grew up and discovered music together, then went on to make it together. It's sort of a fairy tale no matter how it ends, you know?" Lucky for us, it ends gracefully with Small Light, an oddly buoyant meditation on deaths literal and metaphoric, the lovely, last and fittingly idiosyncratic crowning achievement of a band that has always done things its own way.