Today marks the release of A Decoration, a six-song collaboration between Mackenzie Scott of TORRES and Eric D. Johnson of Fruit Bats. The EP is available digitally wherever you listen to music and as a special 12-inch pressed on opaque red vinyl with a B-side etching. It’s available now in the Merge store and limited to 500 hand-numbered copies worldwide.

Though A Decoration’s dreamy blend of TORRES and Fruit Bats sounds like the assured work of fellow travelers who’ve pushed each other in the studio for years, Scott and Johnson first met at the Merge 35 festival in July. Initiated at the suggestion of Merge label co-founder Mac McCaughan, the two quickly shared ideas and began building songs without so much as FaceTiming each other. “The whole recording process wound up being done totally remotely with each of us on our respective coasts,” Johnson explains. “It was like assembling a cross-continental jigsaw puzzle in the ether.”

In working together, Scott and Johnson neither changed TORRES or Fruit Bats at their core to suit their collaborator’s ideas, nor did they merely look for places in each other’s music where they could fit themselves in. A Decoration is something else entirely, something new and vibrant and vital to the catalogs of two songwriters whose most recent albums, Fruit Bats’ A River Running to Your Heart and TORRES’ What an enormous room, found them at the peak of their creative powers, at a perfect moment to begin a new conversation through song.

“Music really is its own language,” Scott says. “I’ve always believed that the best music is something that doesn’t need to be explained or discussed at all—you either get it or you don’t. With Eric, in terms of the musical language that was spoken, we didn’t have to talk that much at all; we just got what the other person was doing, which transcends personalities or conversation altogether.”

In addition to A Decoration, Fruit Bats fans who missed out on the tour exclusive live cassette Starry-eyed, in Stereo can now purchase the tape directly from Merge or the Fruit Bats webstore. Fruit Bats return to the road in full force this September and headline the Eric D. Johnson–curated My Sweet Midwest two-night event in Chicago in October. All dates can be found below this full statement from Eric D. Johnson on A Decoration:

I’ve been a fan of the music of TORRES for a long time, so when Mac suggested it to me, I jumped at the chance. The whole recording process wound up being done totally remotely with each of us on our respective coasts—it was like assembling a cross-continental jigsaw puzzle in the ether.

Mackenzie and I worked on this in a breezy way where all ideas and sounds were fair game. We each brought a few sketches into the initial ideas pile and treated them in a way like we were doing remixes of each other's songs. There were no wrong answers. The back and forth continued until the music was in a totally different place from where it began.

Sometimes when you do collaborative projects, it ends up just sounding like an amalgam of the two artists. This process assured that the final EP kinda sounds like nothing either of us has ever done—it’s a collection of wishful love chants, patiently unfolding fuzzy loops, danceable ambience, and pleas to the universe.

Fruit Bats on tour:
Aug 17 Woodstock, NY – Meadowlark Festival Preview at Levon Helm Studio (Solo)
Sep 11 Westerly, RI – United Theatre
Sep 12 Portland, ME – Portland House of Music and Events [SOLD OUT]
Sep 13 South Burlington, VT – Higher Ground
Sep 14 Stone Ridge, NY – Meadowlark
Sep 20 Stockholm, SE – Maxim (Solo)
Oct 18–19 Chicago, IL – My Sweet Midwest