Paul Duncan has always been moved by visions. Like the one he had early last year about the kind of music he wanted to be making. The east Texas native found his clearest picture after endless hours walking the streets of Brooklyn with headphones blaring the pieces of a synthed-out study in New Wave that he’d been working on.

"I had finally found a palette that I enjoyed working with, which has always been important for me, because I tend to think about music and words very visually," Duncan remembers of his time mentally putting together last May’s Claws Overhead EP.

"I went to art school and spent way more time painting and making visual art throughout my early twenties than I did playing any instruments or recording music. I’ve always been fascinated with small worlds, creating environments and metamorphic interpretations of things, and I seem to get that from certain music the same way I do from painting."

Paul Duncan is always seeing something. And to fully bring his vision into focus, he knew he couldn’t go it alone. Fortunately, he had a friend in Roberto Lange, and one night he went to see Lange’s band, Helado Negro, perform at The Knitting Factory. Playing with Lange that night was Oliver Chapoy, a guitarist who Duncan envisioned would fit into his Claws Overhead aesthetic quite well.

Duncan remembers expressing interest in collaborating with Chapoy immediately after the show. "He was doing all this textural stuff that I really enjoyed and responded to," says Duncan. "It was a lot like what I was working on with Claws Overhead, so it just really clicked when I saw him perform. I also knew that we’d get along famously and had a lot of common musical ground—that combo is where it’s at!" The two got to work immediately under the moniker Warm Ghost, remastering three tracks on Claws Overheard and writing three more for a new EP set to drop Feb. 15 on Partisan Records. Called Uncut Diamond, the EP offers a new take on an old vision that’s been augmented by Chapoy’s presence.

"There are habits you get into when you’re writing by yourself," admits Duncan, who still handles the brunt of the songwriting load. "Writing electronic music, I got into the habit of just staring at the computer screen way too much. [Chapoy] being here creates an atmosphere that feels more like songwriting, especially in the collaborative sense."

That sense of songwriting shows up even more boldfaced on the duo’s upcoming full-length debut, set to be released in August. Currently only four songs into the writing of the album, Warm Ghost has set out to piece together a narrative far more eclectic and emotionally wide-ranging than anything found on its earlier works. And it goes without saying that Duncan has adopted an appropriately intricate vision for the album’s overarching message.

"I feel like it’ll be more upbeat than Claws Overhead, though there will still be some darker, moodier songs in the mix," he says of the unnamed LP. "My idea for it is that there’ll be this character, and all the lyrics come from him thinking to himself inside his head. And then it’s sort of up and down. Certain days for him are good and certain ones are bad. The darker songs would be the bad days and the brighter ones would obviously reflect the good ones. So there’ll be that variation, whereas Claws Overhead was just consistently made in the same mood."

Like Duncan’s previous projects, he’s found his muse for the LP in another creative discipline.

"I’m really into story writing these days," he says, " and I thought it would be cool to write an album in the firstperson. I really like the idea of embedding a concept into something and giving the listener a chance to pick up on what we’re doing without directly telling them."

Evidence that, like its namesake spirit, Warm Ghost exists—at least conceptually—in the abstract.

–
Warm Ghost
Feb. 12, Glasslands, 289 Kent Ave. (betw. S. 1st & S. 2nd Sts.), Brooklyn, 718- 599-1450; 8:30, $10.

As a collective, the members of this Brooklyn-via-New London, Conn., garage slop quintet have been playing together in one lineup or another for nearly nine years. But Conversion Party itself is just over four years old and was born by fate or flub, depending on how you perceive the events of one weekend in 2005.

Guitarist Alex Waxman was already living in Brooklyn, but he’d gone to college in New London and was tight with the punk scene that included drummer Matt Potter, bassist/ guitarist Ben Johnson, multi-instrumentalist Matt Allen and keyboardist Matt Clark.

“Clark had this idea to record a bunch of his songs during a weekend all-star project of people from the New London scene,” says Waxman. “The plan was to get together with a bunch of booze and play songs with all the best musicians in town. But only five people ended up showing.” Those five would go on to make up Conversion Party.

Of course, it wasn’t completely smooth sailing in New London. Johnson moved to New York in 2007, and with no identifiable hub, Conversion Party stalled. Johnson and Waxman tried to find outfits in Brooklyn with little success. They kept returning to New London, coming back to work on new material with the old crew.

“Part of playing music with people is being comfortable letting your ideas fly,” explains Waxman. “You have to be willing to compromise and say ‘no’ when it’s necessary. We had this great thing going with these dudes up in New London, so we made it work.”

Patience led to progress. Conversion Party had already worked together long enough to accumulate 11 songs, and in 2007 the band traveled to a friend’s studio in Philadelphia to record a sometimes-thrashy, sometimesmelodic debut album, More No More.

The album made Conversion Party materially official, but the group still lacked a legitimate home base. Not punk like the rest of New London—fine by these guys since they were shooting for something decidedly bigger than its insular underground— Conversion Party chose to focus on New York despite three members living two hours away.

Again, patience. The band would play shows in New York and Potter, Clark and Allen would sleep on the floors of their bandmates’ apartments. Waxman and Johnson would drive to Connecticut every weekend they weren’t gigging to practice.

The buzz started growing, gigs popped up around town more often. Songs came together quicker and sounded more like Conversion Party songs than conglomerations of independent ideas.

Throughout, the band kept things in perspective. It built slowly, remained incentive-driven.

“The geographical thing can be a challenge,” Clark admits. “I think it’s also a huge part of what goes into the band and the resulting product. It helps you realize that you have something worth working towards. Because we’ve been able to make inroads in the city, it gives you a nice incentive to keep working at it and to take yourself seriously.”

Johnson adds, “We’ve been working really hard to get better as a band, but we’ve always worked hard to be smart about the way we proceed so that we can provide those incentives to continue to take the steps to take ourselves more seriously.”

Keeping those incentives intact has become easier to justify thanks to the recent attention the band has been receiving. Since October, Conversion Party has released two tracks—the fuzzed-out “False Teeth” and bouncy “Birds of Paradise Lost”—that have received attention from the all-important world of music blogs. Both songs are part of a full-length album, produced by Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s Sean Greenhalgh, that’s slated for a spring 2011 release. It’s a definitively tighter package than what’s found on More No More, and a ripe fruit of extensive labor.

“I love this stupid record,” says Clark.

“Even though it was painful to make at times, I love it. I feel like I’ve raised a teenager now.”

Further proof that good things come to those who wait.

>> CONVERSION PARTY Dec. 30, Bruar Falls, 245 Grand St. (betw. Driggs Ave. & Roebling St.) , Brooklyn, 347-529-6610; 8, $TBA.

“It’s nice to hear an American voice again,” vocalist Eleanore Everdell says as she takes the phone. She and multiinstrumentalist Jason Friedman are halfway through The Hundred In The Hands’ first “full-blown” European tour of their brief but already exciting career together. As Friedman suggests, this particular foray is going quite well.

“Europeans are not as fearful of synthesizers as people have been in America, where people used to get a little freaked out by them,” he says. “But [Europeans] do have a much longer history of being open to dance music, so I think they’ve adopted us a bit faster.”

The Hundred In The Hands formed in 2008 when Everdell, a Williamsburg singer/songwriter who had worked on songs with TV On the Radio and Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson, joined Friedman as part of the touring band for his self-helmed project The Boggs, an anything-goes outlet that stretched from Afro-pop to the delta blues to garage rock. The two found a connection in new ideas, and upon their return to Brooklyn, went into the studio to record the song “Dressed in Dresden,” which the band released online in December 2008.

British dance and underground hiphop tastemaker Pure Groove picked the track up for a 7-inch in March 2009. That June, The Hundred signed a record deal with U.K. electronic powerhouse Warp, home to !!! (whom Hundreds began their European tour supporting), Grizzly Bear and Flying Lotus. A well-received EP, This Desert, followed a year later.

Currently, the duo is touring in support of its full-length debut, a selftitled work rooted in European dancepop that’s both expansive and multidimensional: a collage of synthesizers and bass-heavy grooves that draws on myriad subtle influences, including hip-hop, R&B or punk.

These diverse influences have provided both the pain and pleasure for Friedman and Everdell, two songwriters not used to collaborating on ideas in the studio— though you wouldn’t be able to tell from their quick adaptation.

“In The Boggs, I was obviously the only songwriter,” says Friedman. “What came out of it was all mine. Eleanore also has experience songwriting, so the big thing for us has been working with a collaborator for the first time and learning how to handle those different opinions and ideas.”

His cohort takes it a step further:

“For me, it was a relief to have someone to talk to about stuff. When you’re the driving force behind a band, like with what I was doing before we met or what Jason was doing with The Boggs, it can be exhausting. You carry a lot of burden with you.”

Differing opinions leading to new ideas may be the foremost charm within the band’s dichotomy. It’s allowed The Hundreds In The Hands to exist as equal parts push and pull, contained in the studio and raged on the stage.

“We’re definitely louder live than on the record, which is pretty cleanly produced,” says Everdell. “We like to feature Jason’s guitar more on stage, and he has some shoegaze-y effects that make everything bigger and crazier. With recorded music and live music, there are really two different sets of rules for how you go about it, and we try to do extended versions of songs and get a bit more zoned out when we’re playing for people.”

So far, the changes have been met with positive results, though live exposure in America has been held to somewhat of a minimum. The band ran a short tour with The Temper Trap in early autumn, but most of its time has been devoted to writing new songs.

“Neither of us are people who can write that well on the road,” Everdell admits, explaining the band’s touring rationale. “We tend to need more of a closed-off, focused space to write properly.”

That time will come again with the New Year—starting with a homecoming at Webster Hall. Welcome home—we’ll do our best to hold off the fog.

>> The Hundred In The Hands Dec. 9, The Studio at Webster Hall, 125 E. 11th St. (betw. 3rd & 4th Aves.), 212-353-1600; 8, $15.

“It’s definitely less of a studied thing than it is a feeling,” the 27-year-old, who performs as Highlife, admits. “The circular nature of that music is really something that I feel well in command of. I don’t know African music region to region in an encyclopedic way, but I intuit the feeling of it well, and it’s become a part of how I play now. I have more of a feeling of the circular aspect of it than maybe having certain different reference points.”

Circular’s a good word for it. Shaw’s Best Bless EP, out this week, was written in a style he calls “circular songwriting”: devoid of any defined backbeat, each song has a celebratory, seemingly endless feel. But his foray into the world of African music has also taken quite an ambiguous path.

Born in London to a British father and a mother from Wisconsin, Shaw quickly took to America’s wealth of roots and folk recordings. When he turned 19, he used his dual citizenship to move across the Atlantic, settling in Eugene, Ore., where he soon found himself spending days drinking liquor with old men and nights gigging with Sacramento retro poppers Baby Grand. Both would lead to his eventual pilgrimage to New York in 2005, when Shaw left Baby Grand after an East Coast tour.

For years Shaw meandered through living situations and band rosters within the city, playing guitar with Mira Billotte’s mythically witchy White Magic and bass for cosmic pop party starters Gang Gang Dance.

He birthed Highlife on a 2008 trip to Trinidad’s Gaspar Grand Island, where he recorded four of Best Bless‘ five songs; “Wet Palm Trees,” a barebones closer featuring nothing but Shaw’s voice and an acoustic guitar, was recorded on a St. Lucia beach one New Year’s Eve. Shaw suggests that the Caribbean lifestyle allowed him to grow so familiar with Highlife’s West African roots.

“Trinidad
wasn’t a good island for cane production in the 18th and 19th
centuries, so it was primarily used as an island for breeding slaves,”
he explains. “All that Calypso and guitar music fed back to West Africa
and blended with their rhythms, making what’s known today as Highlife
music.”

Shaw left Trinidad shortly after laying down the original recordings to Best Bless and
stopped in London to rerecord the album before returning to Brooklyn.
He put down most of the tracks himself, though help came in the form of
Billotte, who contributed background vocals to the Vampire Weekend pop
of “Tuareg Dancehall,” Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti bassist Tim Koh and
Jesse Lee, who plays drums in Gang Gang Dance. A first single, the
celebratory “F Kenya Rip,” was released shortly after completion of the
project and was well-received by music websites, but the rest Shaw kept
under wraps until the EP’s release.

Fans may just be getting used to the songs on Best Bless by
the time his Oct. 6 show at Zebulon (with Lichens and Callers) rolls
around, but Shaw’s already got his mind on putting together new
material.

“I’m
looking forward to getting something else out there soon,” he says of a
new project, which he hopes to release in the spring of 2011. “Just the
fact that ‘F Kenya Rip’ has been around for a year and people have that
record; I’m just looking forward to getting another document out there.”

Don’t
expect to see Shaw shooting from the same circular system, either. The
Park Slope resident is focused on not being the kind of artist who gets
stuck on one style—during our interview he played an acoustic guitar and
a Shruti box, an Indian harmonium instrument, and made references to
performing sometimes with an acoustic guitar, sometimes with a full band
and sometimes with nothing but his own voice. So, assume nothing.

“Highlife
already has a large weighting on the influence of African music,” he
says, “but I have many different styles. Maybe the next thing won’t
sound like this too much.”

But Doug, it’s all good if it does.

>> HIGHLIFE Oct. 6, Zebulon, 258 Wythe Ave. (betw. N. 3rd St. & Metropolitan Ave.), Brooklyn, 718-218-6934; 9, $TBA.