At once a love letter to film soundtracks and a meditative balm for our troubled times, The Valley, The Mountains, The Sea was recorded by Fairchild on a bare-bones mobile rig while on tour with Modest Mouse, in the cracks of time between soundcheck and performances, from city to city, in darkened hotel rooms and over-lit backstage dressing rooms, giving the album a sense of intimacy, of stolen time and weary after show solitude.

Playfully conceived as an imaginary score to an imaginary film in the spirit of the 90s sleeper classic ‘The Ice Storm’, the album is cinematic in a homespun way, at times recalling the innovative film music of Hildur Gudnadottir and Oneohtrix Point Never telescoped through a back porch Sigur Ros or the delicate cobwebs of barely-there slowcore Americana.

A linchpin track off the album, ‘Life At One’ is imprinted by Snider’s choral-like humming and an emotionally riveting video by animator Riley Thompson. In the words of Fairchild, “It’s one of the first songs that we worked on together and became the spiritual center for the album. I wrote the central musical themes and once Jacob's voice entered the picture, providing the autumnal glow, the song became what it was supposed to, and pointed the way to so much more music.”

The instrumental project of guitarist Jim Fairchild (Grandaddy / Modest Mouse / All Smiles) and songwriter/composer Jacob Snider (named Best New Artist by NPR-affiliate WXPN-Philadelphia), Small Isles inhabits a rare hypnotic twilight between motion picture music and incandescent cosmic folk.