the longest route…

Cardboard Sangria Records was started in 1999 by Gary Pyskacek and Dan Schneider (or us from here on out), then both playing in the Pedal Steel Transmission. We had just spent a month in Europe, sleeping on beaches, avoiding machine guns and taunting wine growers en masse. “Oh, you’re going to be in Barcelona…. Oh my god! You HAVE to try the sangria… it’s ammmaaaaazing.” What’s the first thing we did? Find the nearest dusty little bodega, and order up two “sangrias” for the beach. What the little old man got from the top of a ladder attached to the shelf was dusty, strong, and taxing on the body (now emblematic of our 10-year + career), leaving us sprawled asleep on the beach. When we returned to Chicago too damaged to re-enter normal life (after immediately seeing the first Star Wars months late), we holed up in the practice room in the loft and recorded the ideas we’d been hashing over in the streets. The result was the debut ep by Sainte Chapelle, a hushed affair improvised in a single weekend on the trusty Tascam 4-track. The tapes were put in a drawer for six months while we got our act together, but when we pulled the out, the idea seemed clear: Let’s put this out. AND let’s spend the time it’d take to beg for someone else to put it out to make more music (alas, the name was Dan’s idea). The rest is all in here somewhere…

gp