The experimental, improv-heavy Portland noise duo Yellow Swans were a prolific force in the ’00s, but the group decided to break up in 2008, and they went dormant for years. In 2020, Yellow Swans started posting archival material on Bandcamp, and they got back together to play their first live show in 15 years at Austin’s Oblivion Access festival. Now, Yellow Swans have released the two-track, 28-minute tape Out Of Practice I.

Out Of Practice I is getting a cassette release, and its two tracks are divided up simply into “Side A” and “Side B” — both different takes on the same piece, essentially. On Bandcamp, Yellow Swans write that it’s the first in “a series of 3 or 4 tapes documenting our recordings from 2023.” Both tracks were recorded live — “Side B” at Oblivion Access — and they’re the kind of textured, psychedelic drone that has always been Yellow Swans’ trademark. Here’s what they say about the recordings on their Bandcamp page:

Getting back to playing was a whole thing. Neither of us had been playing much music and weren’t sure how we’d get back to it since we live pretty far apart and had opted in to playing shows. We always leaned on improvisation in our sets and our last few years were entirely improvisational, so we decided we’d create a few frameworks for playing our live gigs to give us something to lean on. In a sense, “songs” but VERRRRY loose. So here’s a tape documenting two very different versions of one of those pieces, which was based around some vague ideas and tape loops of early music fragments. We are old now, history, and we wanted to play with history. L O L. Anyway, I think the music is pretty good. Not bad for a band that hasn’t recorded anything or played out in 15 years.

Out Of Practice I is out now and available on Bandcamp.