Gyan Riley and Noah Georgeson grew up together right here in our sister-city, Nevada City, sharing a fringe obsession with classical guitar as kids. "There were few people I could bond with over that," Gyan remembers. "Basically just my teacher and Noah."
Devendra Banhart came into the friendship later, meeting the two of them in Brooklyn, years after Noah and Devendra had already made music together in San Francisco and beyond. "Everything was sparkling and I felt like a little kid," Devendra remembers. "I knew we must play."
That friendship is HUG, a largely instrumental record built in three weeks. It opens with frogs, carries field recordings from a sacred hill in India and a river running through Venezuela and Colombia, and closes with a guitar loop Noah and Devendra first created twenty years ago in Venice Beach. On November 18, that friendship comes home, ten minutes from where it started.
