Victorious Combinations

    Love Ballad (Official Video)    We are quite pleased to present out new video, Love Ballad filmed on location at Isabelle's shop, the Isabelle Dunlop Clothing Store. The video is a literal depiction of a day in the life of Combine the Victorious' singer and independent clothing designer Isabelle Dunlop featuring Carmel Amit as the loyal customer!  Video produced by Boutique Empire Directed and Edited by HENNING Camera operators: Mark R Henning, Isabelle Dunlop   Isabelle Dunlop Clothing Store 4158 Main Street, Vancouver BC

  Love Ballad / Thunder  double A-side Our first release partnered with Thorvald Records Artwork by Stephen R Gilmore Produced by Henning at Boutique Empire Studio Recorded at Boutique Empire and Hipposonic Studios Listen on  Spotify Apple Music Tidal

Hello! Isabelle here. Just wanted to share a little bit about our song Thunde r from the lyrical perspective.  The lyrics for Thunder were born from an idea sparked at my studio at the shop, the hum of the sewing machine plain to hear in the backdrop of my original voice memo. “I’m feeling you, it’s coming through like thunder” I've often found that as I sew or iron away my mind can drift off into analyzing conversations and moments that have been caught in my head. Last summer we were in the process of moving from our home of 24 years and I realize that I was kind of saying goodbye to that place. It had always been such a safe, protective and creative space. It was like losing a friend. The same as with friendship there is an ebb and flow as we need it and it’s okay when things change, in fact it’s completely natural. As we walk away from an old home I feel no pain because I believe in the new adventure and all that it holds. The cool thing is that I played the nugget ...

 We have been writing away these past 18 months or so, trying not to let the time escape us during this Covid 19 era.  Back in the summer of 2020 Combine ran into our friend Rob Darch, who gifted us an anniversary present of a recording weekend at Hipposonic studios. Hipposonic is located in the exact studio space that was once Little Mountain Sound   (world famous for records by Metallica, Bon Jovi, Aerosmith... Pure and countless other massive hits).  Isabelle and I had started several new songs but weren't too sure which were the ones we wanted to record so I made the decision to go for broke and record as much as possible over that August weekend. We loaded up with 6 songs, ranging from the very moody track we are releasing this week ( Thunder ) to some dance numbers and a couple out-right rockers which have kinda fallen behind.  It was a fun session with two different drummers, a violinist, a trumpet player and everyone from my folkband Farmteam coming i...

      At the beginning of 2021 I took over Ryan Dahle's studio in the Song City building here in Vancouver. As one of the tasks I set for myself Isabelle and I recorded the following song, "The Love Ballad". We had collaborated and written this song for another person to sing back in 2018 but that fell through so the song just kinda sat on a hard drive for the past years. Then, while we were in Hipposonic Studio this past summer (thanks again for the great session Rob Darch!) Isabelle suggested we try tracking drums and other instruments on the demo. In the fast paced session we blasted through 6 songs (including the ballad) and then took everything home to discover what we'd captured.  After much reflection I decided the version we'd recorded was not the version I wanted to present to the world. Nothing wrong with any of the parts we'd tracks individually but the song didn't sound like our own yet. So over the xmas season Isabelle and I rehea...

 So back a month ago we had a song we'd composed for an Australian fashion magazine, Façon, licensed to the Netflix series Tiny Pretty Things.  It is featured in episode one of the show and in a rather racy scene as well! We had never really intended on doing a proper formal release for the song but a few comments on various online sites suggested people wanted to hear it! So we made a lyric video with some nice kaleidoscopic footage to go with it. Please check it out below:     In other news we have been working really hard on a new love ballad. We shall be debuting a mix of the song tomorrow for Valentine's day on our soundcloud page. Please stay tuned, it is quite the big song!     thanks for reading and checking out the music. We both really appreciate your attention and support! Mark

 We are really pleased to release our song "What's Going on in Your Head," this week. It has been a long journey to arrive at this release, starting from the Los Angeles living room of friend and producer Stefan Sigerson, to making the song fully twice over. The initial version took on a more full band sound, with live drums and electric guitar and rhodes piano in addition to our usual electronics. However, even after making a final mix and having it mastered we never felt the song connected properly.  So even though we'd spent almost two years attempting to perfect that version I finally decided to scrap it and start over. Taking the drum stem from the original version we imported that into Abelton Live and build an entirely new song. This time instead of quoting so directly from the trip hop influences of Portishead and Massive Attack we took it more minimal and created a new synth driven riff to centre the song to. You can hear it in the intro, the icy slightly dis...