Also known as water witching, dowsing is the ancient practice of finding water, buried mineral deposits, gems, lost pets or possessions, and people. Dowsers tap into movements or vibrations using forked twigs, L-shaped rods, pendulums, or sometimes nothing at all. The accuracy of dowsing is widely debated, and often the relationship between cause and effect is misunderstood or imagined.

Cryptacize began across the street from the C&H Sugar Factory in Crockett, CA, where Nedelle Torrisi and Chris Cohen lived in an apartment slightly tilted. There, constant dizziness and the smell of burning sugar became a permanent part of their psyches. One morning while brushing their teeth, toothpaste running sideways out of their mouths, Nedelle pronounced the word ‘Cryptacize’ and things were never the same. Seemingly, the house now inclined in the opposite direction! Soon after this, they discovered something even stranger – a video of a drummer named Michael Carreira playing his cowbell. Having only this video, they sought him out and convinced him to join their band and shortly there after began working on their first album.

Every song on Dig That Treasure is a miniature journey, a free fantasia, a dreamy habitat built out of the minimum of material. Sudden rhythmic gestures and frequent key changes will leave you feeling pleasantly disorientated in a song. But trust your tour-guides! You might feel as if you’ve come across a small tribe that speaks an unstudied language, and miraculously, find that you can speak it too! Performing live, Nedelle, Mike and Chris watch each other intently, moving in an intuitive way to an unheard pulse, bringing their delicately constructed songs to new life.

Dig That Treasure is humbly inspired by the larger-than-life emotions of West Side Story, the joyfully percussive guitar gospel of Sister Rosetta Tharpe, The Wizard of Oz’s bittersweet escapism, the other-world sentimentality of Sun Ra’s Spaceship Lullaby, and Henry Cowell’s ethereal piano string strumming.