harry the Nightgown

At the age of five, Sami Perez was lonely enough to befriend a tree that sat kidi-corner to San Francisco’s Alamo Square Park and directly below her bedroom window. Due to its ever growing ivy, she named the tree “Harry the Nightgown”. Six years later, Perez began playing shows in San Francisco with her band, The She’s. The quartet formed in middle school with hopes of becoming the next ‘Donnas’. The She’s recorded their debut LP at Women’s Audio Mission (WAM), an SF based non-profit that trains women/gender non-conforming (GNC) audio engineers. From there, Perez continued to hone her engineering skills at WAM, which eventually landed her a job at John Vanderslice’s Tiny Telephone Studios, where she delved deep into abstract styles of music production in Tiny Telephone’s exclusively analog environment.

 In 2014, Perez met Spencer Hartling at a dive bar in Ventura when their respective bands played to a small audience of balding drunks. Impressed with each others’ performances, they forged a long distance friendship and began to collaborate on their music. In 2017, Hartling moved from Los Angeles to a farm on an off-grid plot of land in the mountains of Guerneville. Hartling set up a minimal recording space in a shipping container, and it was there, against the farm’s backdrop of manzanita trees and natural springs that Perez and Hartling began writing and demoing what would eventually become Harry the Nightgown.

In late 2018, Hartling and Perez began to record their debut self-titled album, “Harry the Nightgown” at Tiny Telephone Studios in San Francisco. The album is a showcase of their experimental engineering and production styles, as well as their shared love of playful sonic deconstruction. The songs are a meditation on the struggle of continuing a creative collaboration with an ex-partner.

Harry the Nightgown’s influences range from The Raincoats and XTC to Rosalía and Kate Bush. Their sound has been compared to bands such as Dirty Projectors and Deerhoof. The product is defined by improv “Toast and Punch” recording techniques.

Harry the Nightgown is the pursuit of Hartling and Perez’s artistic partnership as they begin a new chapter in Los Angeles, where they have established their new recording studio, Grandma’s Couch.

Find Harry the Nightgown on Instagram