"I've been listening to this song for almost a decade. It's depressing how fast the time flows." —Enzo Ponce Cano
(That might be the most Brightly comment ever commented.)
Brightly started out in the living room of my brother's place in Sandringham, in Melbourne, around 2010 or 2011. I was on the verge of dropping out of doing a masters in computer science, thinking about studying sound production, and I'd just bought Ableton and a Novation Launchpad. I booked a gig at The Brunswick Hotel and showed up with a laptop and an aux cable, and sang two songs with while the sound person looked on, openly uncomfortable. One song was called Seven Years, and the other eventually became Tokyo, originally recorded with a surreal, terrible faux-American accent (an inexplicably weird creative decision on my part, which led to re-recording a lot of vocals early on). Nic came and watched, for some reason saw something in it. He introduced us to Ony, and the rest is history.
It's hard to believe that it's been a decade since we released our debut album, Beginnings & Endings. Though by all formal measures it was a brief, bright (lol), flash in the pan, it has had an incredibly dedicated fanbase. People still get in touch today to talk about what it meant to them, and how they still revisit it ten years on.
Beginnings & Endings was the genesis of Tweetflight (still the only truly original great idea I've ever had), opened a ton of doors for us, introduced us to Ceres, Japanese Wallpaper, Tim Shiel, Gotye. It got us a publishing contract. It was a Good Thing.
To celebrate this milestone, I'm releasing all of Brightly's music for free. You can grab it on Bandcamp, or you can get all the original WAV files, if you'd prefer something more lossless. I've also gone through and released all of the code behind our interactive music videos, open source. I've tried, where possible, to make them work on modern devices, and to make it easier to fork them and create your own. You can learn more about each individual project here.
Brightly made three albums and an EP. It's by no means over, and you never know what's around the corner, but for now that is its legacy. Thank you for being a part of it.
Cheers, Charlie.