Cathedrals

​Brodie Jenkins grew up in sleepy California wine country in an old farmhouse that echoed with folk, jazz and soul. Before her fifteenth birthday she was signed and touring with her mother and sister in an Americana-steeped family band. Johnny Hwin (now solo project HWIN), the son of Vietnamese refugees, taught himself piano by ear in a small town called Hercules. He played open-mic nights and made beats alongside successful electronic artists like Blackbird Blackbird; after finding success on the business end of the music industry, he was back in the studio full-time by 25. The prodigious and wildly individual lines of their lives snaked and wove around San Francisco—the two of them attended the same college simultaneously but never met—and in the summer of 2012 a mutual friend corralled them together at the fabled San Francisco artist collective, The SUB. Johnny, with his distinct electronic sensibility, had a vault of tracks and an endless string of ideas; Brodie, a soulful crooner with folk roots and a Gothic heart, found an uncanny rapport. Drawing simultaneously from Swedish pop and nineties trip-hop, indie dreamwave and pitch-black trap, Cathedrals effortlessly merge these disparate pieces into the gorgeous geometry that defines their new material.