Hamerkop is a pair of Baltimore-based sound nerds: Annabel Alpers, the composer, singer and instrumentalist formerly of New Zealand's Bacheílorette, and Adam Cooke, a Baltimorean drumímer/audio engineer with credits that include Beach House, Wye Oak and Future Islands. Together, they have created a song-cycle that contrasts the often-mundane (yet often satisfying) everyday world with that of the idealized, longed-for fantasy, to find the spaces in between these things, the place where we all feel good about our existence. Hamerkop's debut, Remote, started as an exploíration of the sonic beauty in Alpers' collection of field recordings from her homeland and travels around the world. Looped and sampled, they became a set of instrumental sounds of their own, and when played live in a multiple-speaker, surround-sound experience, their effect was transporting. The finished album blends these expansive sounds in choral layers of synths and vocals, with a kaleidoscopic, almost psychedelic quality, all of it anchored by Cooke's Kraut-minimal drumming. The sound of Hamerkop is multi-layered, changing as it revolves. It's the sound made by two people, but it could be all of us.