Canopy is the debut EP from duo Painted Palms. With its echoes of Brill Building pop, buoyant electronics, and encompassing textural experimentation, the EP exudes something ebullient as well as meditative. Canopy is a modern psych-pop collage with an affinity for fluidity and the exotic.

Cousins Reese Donohue and Christopher Prudhomme are the creative force behind Painted Palms – a duo in the studio that expands to a five-piece band for live shows. The two grew up together on the same block in Lafayette, Louisiana. After Donohue moved to the Bay Area in California for school, they spent several years exchanging music they had made by themselves – hypnotic sound experiments and song fragments. However, it wasn’t until they both returned home for the winter break in 2009, that they began playing music together. They tried to make a song together for the first time. Two days later, they had completed “Falling Asleep,” the only track on Canopy that was made while they were in the same room.

Soon thereafter, Donohue returned to the Bay Area and Prudhomme remained in Louisiana to complete his college education. Even after making “Falling Asleep”, they never legitimately considered pursuing a musical collaboration because of their distance—until the possibility of collaborating over the internet came up in a phone call weeks later.

After several months of exchanging tracks and building songs, Canopy was finished. Soon after, of Montreal’s Kevin Barnes heard Canopy and invited Painted Palms to act as main support for of Montreal on their 26-date North American tour.

Each song on Canopy reflects the self-discovery that was a constant for both musicians during its making. They came to find that their lifelong relationship had produced within them a strikingly lucid, meaningful way in which to communicate in their newfound creative space. Then, they set out to make this visceral language an intrinsic quality of their music.

According to Donohue, “We placed full artistic and emotional trust in one another and discovered an intense bond that existed between the two of us-one that may have not existed otherwise. Pulling myself apart and focusing on personal honesty influenced a large part of the music, which was made in such a strange and amazing period of self-exploration for both of us. Destroying the contrived and constructed elements of my personality and thought processes-that’s what Painted Palms is to me.”

Painted Palms are ready to move forward while pushing boundaries of many sorts, both as individual musicians and as a collaborative pair. To quote Prudhomme, “We try to reveal the nature of ourselves with the music. That’s a main objective. Each song is our way of confronting obstacles in our personalities or our friendship.”