Too Bad About All Your Problems

ambulette makes music for all your tiny emergencies. Marrying vivid and sometimes blistering vocals to tangled guitar sparring, big beats, and infectious quirk, ambulette has been likened to "X and Wire doing a guest spot on Television." ambulette began as a running joke-slash-pipe dream when long-time musician Matt Brown (Uncle Green/3 Lb. Thrill) and musical upstart Halley O'Malley (Nothing/No One) first began working together musically from opposite coasts in Matt's online collaborative music-making group, Theme Music. Theme Music was a place where pro and project musicians who had left that life could come back and experience the joy of making music again, and a place where total amateurs could get expert, lovingly delivered mentorship from those players. Matt, who had eaten and breathed music for 20 years as part of Uncle Green and then abruptly dropped it for more than a decade, and Halley, a lifelong devourer of live and recorded music who had once picked up a guitar in her teens, represented each end of this experience spectrum. What overlapped was their intense love of music, and fervor for learning and trying new things. As the two worked together and with other musicians in the group, recording songs from mutually loved bands like Pavement, the Pixies, and Wire, that fervor only grew into what some might call obsession. They recorded in fits and starts, in the nooks of busy family- and work-lives, and wherever they could eek out some semblance of space. Matt could often be found working out parts in his Toyota Corolla, and at one point, Halley was using portable hardware to record exclusively from inside a windowless panel van parked on a busy San Francisco street.