Vallis Alps, courtesy.

“Stems” is a term used by electronic producers to refer to the building blocks of a song. According to Vallis Alps‘ David Ansari, the Seattle-born, Sydney-based producer: “For us it can take up to 70 individual instrumental parts to create one song. Stems are the crucial ingredients that make up a song but also the moment where an idea splits and another one [is] introduced.”

The moments of these exact splits that occur in a song are the secret sauce. You would surely think one would guard these secrets like a holy grail; not release them as a downloadable file. This notion taps into the open source culture that is not uncommon in fields like computer software and design, and Vallis Alps were happy to apply this to their music.

Being novices when they first began their Vallis Alps project, Ansari and vocalist Parissa Tosif appreciate how difficult it is to get hold of stems.

“We had so little knowledge, back then, of music, writing and production,” Ansari said. “I remember Googling, watching YouTube, calling friends, anyone to find these stems so we could see how these songs were built.

“After we put out our debut EP, barely nine months later, people were already remixing our music,” he said. “And we got so much attention because of it. So we decided, ‘Why don’t we just give back to the community by giving them these ingredients directly from us.’”

They were inviting their audience to take a closer look at the technical side of what the band was doing. And enabling fans to learn to do it themselves, if they were so inclined. The download got quite the response, causing their account to be suspended due to the overwhelming traffic. It is again available on their website now.

This belies a confidence Vallis Alps have in their craft and trust in their ability to pull another worthy EP out of the hat. There is no denying that there is a sense of magic to their euphoric sweeps of melody, much owing to Tosif’s ethereal vocals. It would be difficult to create a facsimile.

The Vallis Alps EP peaked at Number 1 on Hype Machine when it was independently released in January 2015. It clocked over 2 million SoundCloud plays: 27, 000 of which appeared in the first 24 hours. 

After being featured on Ausie radio station Triple J program “Unearthed,” they went on to be crowd favorites at big festivals at home, and managed to sell out multiple dates in several Australian cities on their upcoming spring tour. They are now repeating this success with their U.S. tour which kicked off in Washington State last week.

Currently about to release their upcoming sophomore EP, Fable, Ansari explained that the duo’s music had already evolved. “Parissa and I, re-learned everything for this next EP, literally starting from scratch.”

When they wrote their first EP, Tosif was living in a town in Canberra while Ansari was in Seattle. Apart from the initial recording of vocals that were done when Tosif visited Ansari in Washington, all else was done over the Internet. Now that Ansari and Tosif call Sydney home, both were in the same room while writing and recording Fable.

So the themes too are changing.

“In the last EP we wanted to create something with that sense of nostalgia and dreams, in terms of aspiration and the kind you get when you sleep,” Ansari said. “With this EP we felt that the nostalgic aspect that worked in our first effort was now backward-looking. We’re always asking how do we apply our shifting desires to our lyrics and sound. We wanted Fable to be forward-looking.”

“Fading,” the first single released from the new EP is light and optimistic, the musical equivalent of running through tall, soft grass on a summer’s morning as the sun streams through sheets hung outside to dry. It’s the kind of thing that laundry detergents like to evoke with labels on their bottles and the scenes Westerns use early on to describe innocence.

This is coupled with Tosif’s yoga-calm head tones, reassuring us: “And now we’re alone in the atmosphere/ And I’m fading.” It contributes to an incredible sense of well-being the track brings. Our cares do peel away. A spring returns to our step.