Wye Oak’s Andy Stack has teamed up with his old friend and one-time college roommate Jay Hammond for an improvisational ambient album called Inter Personal, which will be out in June. Hammond — who is a professor that puts out music of his own under the name Trippers & Askers — and Stack trade back needling guitar tones on lead single “Anxious In Love,” which pulses out over six minutes.

“This music was recorded in a little cabin on the side of a mountain in western North Carolina, outside of a village called Little Switzerland,” Stack explained in a statement (cool place!). “We got together for a few nights without any big expectations or plans — just an opportunity to reconnect and play after living in different cities for the last several years.” Stack continued:

We both slept in the single room of the cabin, and each day we would make coffee (tea for Jay) and start playing. We also spent a lot of time locked in thorny conversations about love, marriage, getting older, various tensions in our lives and within ourselves. The music is a natural extension of those conversations and contradictory feelings; languid and tense, dark and ecstatic. Although it is wordless, I feel that it is imbued with a deep intimacy and warmth, and it was from that place that we came to the name of the record, Inter Personal.

Check it out below.

Here’s what Hammond had to say about “Anxious In Love”:

On the first day of our time together, we took what John Cage would probably call the “Begin Anywhere” approach. We did the musical equivalent of throwing some paint on the canvas, and then we went to lunch. When we got back to the cabin, we laid on the floor and listened back to what we had recorded, which included this opening track of the record. We knew immediately we had something special. It has a taut feeling, as if everything is just getting lashed and whipped around. There’s an out of control, paranoid love that comes across, something like the spastic chatter that comes amidst the excitement of a new connection, or the anxiety that comes from both wanting and fearing a person at the same time. For the video for this song, Andy and his father went out to a field north of Durham and hung a quilt that his mother made in the early 70s and let it catch the wind and the sun. Several of her textiles from that period formed the foundation of the artwork for the record

TRACKLIST:
01 “Anxious In Love”
02 “Inter Personal”
03 “Logging Road”
04 “In E”
05 “Life On A Ship”
06 “Watertight”
07 “The Quietest Singing In The World”

Inter Personal is out 6/9 via Sleepy Cat Records.