the Eidolons

Eidolons

“An apparition. A phantom or spiritual double. The image of an ideal - a band named The Eidolons conjure up haunting possibilities.”

“We go through our lives looking for two things: love and money. It is not always in that order and it is never enough” says Sean Allen Fenn, “It is like chasing the wind; pushing a boulder up the hill, only to have it roll back down again. In the end it is you creating your own experience.”

In 2005, Sean Allen Fenn moved from San Francisco to New York. He met saxophone player Brett Ryan while looking for work. The duo played a few songs at a bar in midtown Manhattan which became a few stand-out tracks on the band's debut album.

The album was recorded in Brooklyn at the end of 2007 with a title, No One Ever Sticks Around That Long. The band's name was indefinite. A chaotic turn of events during the beginning months of 2008 disrupted the personal and musical lives of the band. Upon the departure of their original drummer, Alec Meng, the two core members had to find a suitable replacement. The album had been recorded and commitments to play live had to be honored. Galen Pittman, a jazz musician (as Alec and Brett were), became the still nameless band's new drummer.

Simultaneously, the artist chosen to design the album art was also the girlfriend of Sean Allen Fenn. When the couple broke up, the album art had to be redone. Going back to the drawing board (literally), Sean Allen Fenn, Brett Ryan, and artist Nicole Kenney designed the final artwork.

It coincided that Sean Allen Fenn became aware of the Holographic Universe theory: A hologram starts as a flat image. When it is manipulated by lasers it becomes three-dimensional. If the three-dimensional image is then dissected, each part contains the entire image. Every part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole.

In 1982, what may turn out to be the most significant discovery of our time was made by physicist Alain Aspect. Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles, called eidolons (an ancient Greek word for "phantoms"), are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn't matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart.

What this theory proposes is that the universe is made of one “eidolon” or, in other words, one single unexplainable thing. This singularity is somehow being projected as a hologram. This “hologram” is the universe.

What could be a better moniker for this band? The Eidolons would go on to play a handful of shows before releasing their debut - and breaking up. The Eidolons played their final show in New York City's Lower East Side on September 19, 2008 at The Annex. The Eidolons' debut album, No One Ever Sticks Around That Long, was released September 2, 2008. It was not released on CD. Rather, it is a limited edition T-shirt with a download card attached via Sean Allen Fenn's imprint: Digital Heroine.

The Deli Magazine wrote about this inventive release, “Feeling that printing CDs nowadays is pretty much a waste of money, the Brooklyn based band decided to invest their ‘printing budget’ in band T-Shirts.... if you buy one of those T-Shirts you'll also get a card that will allow you to download their debut album from their website.”

The theme of the album is, “the determination to find love given the reconciliation of the fact that we are alone in the world”. It represents the body of work during 2005 and 2008, when the existential feeling of a vague loneliness was a consistent topic in the lyrics Sean Allen Fenn was writing.

“This album is in essence about loneliness. The loneliness of moving to New York alone; the self imposed alienation. The feeling of abandonment when it is really me who abandoned.”

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