Brooklyn-based indie label Kanine Records — the one that reps hip buzz bands like Grizzly Bear and Oxford Collapse — has had its ear on Florida over the past year and a string of worthy bands have benefited from it. West Palm Beach’s lo fi hang ten-flavored rockers Surfer Blood is the most widely-recognized Florida export, although St. Pete’s own dreamy electro experimenters, Blind Man’s Colour, were snagged by Kanine first. The label’s latest Sunshine State acquisition is Viernes, a Winter Park psyche pop two-piece that intended on becoming a band at all.
Sean Moore and Alberto Hernandez [pictured, photo by Wheat Wurtzburger] originally became acquainted via a mutual friend as teens tooling around the Winter Park music scene. That meeting didn’t spawn an instant or lasting connection at the time, but several years later — after both musicians had graduated from their respective colleges and returned to the Orlando area to settle down into their respective Winter Park lives — their paths crossed again. The timing was just right; both were looking for a creative outlet, and shared similar taste in music as well as the desire to create it purely for the love of it. They also had coinciding free time on Fridays…
“He was living literally, like, five minutes away from my office in Altamonte, so I would cruise over on Fridays. I got out at 3, and he was done teaching at 3, too,” Hernandez told me when I asked him and Moore about the evolution of their partnership in a phone conversation with both musicians last week. Since their significant others worked normal day jobs ‘til 5, “we had this two-hour window every single Friday where we’d just get together and record some stuff and see what happened. It wasn’t ever something we’d intended to make into a band. We just wanted to have fun.” Hence the reason the duo eventually dubbed their project Viernes, which translates to “Friday” in Spanish.
This article appears in Jun 10-16, 2010.