“There’s something about making a beat in your bedroom and then hearing it on a gigantic sound system that just turns me into an excitable six year old,” says Nick Sanborn, one half of the electro-charged, psychedelic-influenced Sylvan Esso. “As a grown man, it’s a condition I’m learning to live with.”

While working as electronic producer Made Of Oak, he met Amelia Meath and helped her remix the song “Play It Right” that she had written for her band, Mountain Man. (Meath’s also worked with Feist and Real Estate’s Alex Bleeker, while Sanborn has toured with Megafaun.) The two felt an immediate connection and Sanborn ended up opening for her band in “an ill-fitting, yet serendipitous concert booking.” They realized they were meant to collaborate and continued to do so via voice memos and emails while apart.

In 2013, they made Sylvan Esso a full-time project and moved to Durham, N.C., to work, recording 10 songs in Sanborn’s apartment bedroom that ended up on their eponymous Partisan debut last May. “We definitely keep one another motivated—I always want to be bringing Amelia my best work, and I think she feels the same,” he says of their innate connection and ability to respond to one another’s beats and melodies.

“The music scene here is phenomenal and a constant source of inspiration for us,” he says of Durham. “Plus, this is one of those, unfortunately, rare places where everyone just wants to help great things happen. Mention a decent idea at a bar and 10 people will volunteer to help out the next day.”

While at home, the duo likes to eat, sleep and relax. “Our hometown has such amazing food. We flew in from tour last night and drove straight out to Hillsborough
to eat an absurd number of wings at the Wooden Nickel,” Sanborn says. “And once, during a short stretch of days off, we got to hang out on an oceanography ship with the estranged son of its captain, making for the craziest mid-tour break ever.”

For now, Sylvan Esso will keep on traveling and playing upcoming summer festivals, and they are excited to have some time to write. “I think we’re like most bands in that when we’ve been writing for a while, we get excited about playing shows, and when we’ve been playing shows for a while, we get excited about writing again.”