Erin Durant - Catacomb Saints - Michael Paul Lawson - Keøma - Glass Mountain - Chapell
Erin Durant has just shared her fourth and final single from the forthcoming album 'Islands'. Her appealing and gentle vocals glide above a restrained yet detailed musical canvas, 'Islands' should be good.
'Bankquilizer' from Catacomb Saints is atmospheric and simmers with restrained power, the mixture of post punk and sonic exploration both musically and vocally gives this song some rotatable edge.
Michael Paul Lawson has released the song 'Memories And Throttle' a refined singer songwriter piece his vocals are perfect for folk orientated music as they convey emotion and earnest feeling.
We first featured Keøma in April this year and they return with 'Young' accompanied by a video, their fresh and extremely catchy music once again proving hard to resist.
'Autumn Jam' by Glass Mountain is a hook laden indie rocker, the bands natural delivery and level of distinct overall sound, helps them stand out in what is a crowded music genre.
The overall production and resulting sound on Chapell's latest song 'Ride' is a deliciously rich, the musical arrangement and backing vocals are superb and allow enough room for Alan Chapell's palpable voice to own the piece.
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Erin Durant - Rising Sun.
The fourth and final single from Erin Durant’s forthcoming ‘Islands,’ ‘Rising Sun’ is its raison d’etre, the grand statement that leads you by the hand into her sprawling, sun-dappled archipelago. Over a gently strolling guitar and muted toms, Durant sings ‘I’m going far, I’m going wide’, signalling her intention to embed you within her travelling time machine. A lesson in sophistication, ‘Rising Sun’ fuses strung-out trumpets with Durant’s balm-like voice. ‘Rising Sun’ is like the lavender you spread on your pillow to induce sleep. Lie with it, doze off and dream of magical lands.
Rarely does an artist appear, as if out of thin air, with a full body of work where lyrically lush songs carry you into other worlds as if they were your own. Erin Durant's second album, Islands is an odyssey of sorts, with songs that blur the line between reality and fiction. Produced by TV On The Radio’s Kyp Malone, the eight songs deliver clarity within mystery and adventure in their uncluttered vignettes.
Born and raised in New Orleans, Durant has been based in New York for over a decade, all the while keeping track of the intricacies of life surrounding her and diligently developing her craft as a songwriter and performer. Lyrically, she composes most songs on piano, songs that tend to unfold structurally like a memory or a scene from a movie. As a performer, Durant usually transports a 232-pound ¾ size piano to venues without one. To hear her play the instrument makes plain her case for the extra effort. Her music is rooted in an ongoing dialogue between the physicality of her playing and the high, clear tone of her voice. Enmeshed with one another, it’s a display of an artist in full possession of herself and vision.
Islands sprawls out in front of you, weaving disparate stories into an overarching narrative. The songs touch on the ability to find meaning in minutiae. On “Take A Load Off” Durant tells a story of a weary traveler disoriented but pulled into revelry in an attempt to assuage their loss. The titular track “Islands” takes a similar tact, focusing on the conflicting process of attempting to find joy when joy seems lost. Islands is a continuously shifting landscape, with a knowing nod to the inevitability of these shifts.
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Catacomb Saints - Bankquilizer.
Catacomb Saints share their new atmospheric post-punk meets folk single "Bankquilizer". Regarding the song, the band stated ""Bankquilizer" is a hypnotizing post-punk ballad of greed and violence, sung in a visceral style inspired by Nick Cave and the falsetto of Klaus Nomi. This song is a call to arms to rise up and not be tranquilized by banks and good ol’ boys. We recorded this long distance between LA and Edmonton, but that distance pales in comparison with the distance between the oppressor and the oppressed."
Catacomb Saints is Neil Holyoak (Holy Oak) and synth artist Devon Beggs. They recorded their first song in a cave in Banff, Alberta. Neil was burnt out on folk music and could only sing one line over and over again. They traveled through the Canadian Rockies in mid-winter to seek inspiration in a dank dark cave.
Immersed in the unusual environment and through sonic experimentation, they began a new composition. Playing the entire cave like a giant instrument, they used the natural reverberation to create a sonic landscape. Neil began making records in Montreal under the band name Holy Oak in 2007. Inspired by poets such as Thich Nhat Hahn, Rabindranath Tagore and Tomas Tranströmer, Neil’s fascination lies with the dark undercurrent of the subconscious.
Devon’s background is visual art, but his work in performance and video led him to experiment with synthesizers and homemade instruments. He uses a process based approach to synthesis and composition, in the spirit of Brian Eno or John Cage. Catacomb Saints release their EP, Cruel as the Grave, on June 14th, 2019. They’re currently working on their first full length album, which they’re recording at their studio on a small island in the Pacific Northwest.
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Michael Paul Lawson - Memories And Throttle.
Michael Paul Lawson was born into a deeply musical family, with generations of band leaders, classically trained academics, and brass band legends before him. While his early inclinations were to follow in their footsteps, his contentious relationship with his father and the urgings of his family to pursue more lucrative career paths, dampened his musical ambitions. Trading in the rust of northern New York for the luster of Long Island’s gold coast, Lawson set his artistry to the side in pursuit of corporate life. Eight years later, saddled with student loan debt and weary from the relentless New York City grind, Lawson moved, on a whim, to Norfolk, VA.
In Norfolk Lawson found space and clarity. He could watch the sunrise over the Atlantic and the sunset across the Blue Ridge Mountains in the same day. In Virginia the music started to flow. Plain-spoken ballads with deceptively straight-forward lyrics. A mix of beautiful prose and raw realities, conjuring up the early work of Jason Isbell and the slow burning, sobering lyrics of John Prine. Lawson was soon singing these songs in breweries and bars across Virginia, working it out, making up for lost time.
A disciplined artist with a punch-clock work ethic, Lawson began building a reputation as one of the most prolific writers and performers in the area, and he quickly began securing notable slots at the Norfolk Folk Festival and providing opening support for The Steel Wheels, and Sons of Bill. Eventually, his songs reached producer Daniel Mendez (Noah Gundersen, The Native Sibling) who offered Michael a development deal and an invite to track a debut EP in Austin.
Returning to Austin, where Lawson spent childhood summers visiting his father, was cathartic. It had been 16 years since Lawson was last in hill country, and 16 years since he last saw his father’s silhouette in the back of a squad car, when the constant drinking and violence came to a head in the Texas night, ultimately leading to their estrangement. It was an odd place to return now that he was carving out a new life path, but it also felt strangely in step with the material he had written for his debut EP, Some Fights You’ll Never Win. He was reconciling his relationship with his father, there in the flesh, and in the studio, as he committed his highly personal songs to tape. It was a healing experience, coming full circle, continuing the lineage of musical craftsmanship that had run in his family for generations.
“It’s taken a long time for me to get to where I should have been going from the start,” Lawson reflects. But taking the ‘back roads’ gave him the clear understanding, as the songs on Some Fights You’ll Never Win attest, that the most important battles to dive into are internal.
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Keøma - Young.
KEØMA, the collaborative project between Sydney-born, Berlin-based multi-instrumentalist/producer Kat Frankie and Cologne-based singer-songwriter Chris Klopfer, have released their new album "Saudade" alongside a video for "Young".
"Young" is a summery jangle-pop number with a lo-fi video celebrating the carefree feeling of youth as the duo take a trip down memory lane. Clips of sandy beaches, ice-blue swimming pools and palm trees are composed together like flickering memories of a postcard from an unforgettable holiday.
Kat Frankie is a well-known character in the German music landscape via her soulful indie pop, dynamic live shows and collaborations with top-tier German acts (Clueso, Olli Schulz, Casper & Materia). Chris Klopfer hails from the indie rock world, writing in both English and German and duetting with some of Germany’s finest singer-songwriters (Gisbert zu Knyphausen, Moritz Krämer).
This fateful and organically evolving project came together after Klopfer caught a performance from Frankie and suggested they write a song together. The name originates from a Castellari Spaghetti-Western movie about a gunfighter who returns to his hometown only to find out that it’s been ravaged by plague and menaced by outlaws.
Saudade is the duo’s latest release; an album whose title suggests a longing for brighter seasons. Gone is the dusty melancholy of their previous offering - instead, a more blissful pop-focused chapter has opened up. The album was written and recorded in Berlin and though the artists are certainly in a happier space, Klopfer admits many of the lyrics reflect his homesickness for his hometown of Köln.
“Those songs are about yearning for a home or vacation, which came from feeling isolated in cold, big Berlin as a small town boy. Our Saudade is the strong desire for a place you can call home, with the people you love.” Saudade puts Klopfer’s honest lyricism and heartfelt vocals into focus, while honing in on Frankie producing. Their collaboration with Markus Ganter (Casper, Drangsal) brought their sound radiating more into the pop world, exactly how they wanted it to be.
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Glass Mountain - Autumn Jam.
Bradford based four-piece Glass Mountain have released their new single ‘Autumn Jam’.
The single follows their EP ‘Wow & Flutter’ and lead single ‘Gin Flows Through My Veins’ and is a song about the joy and fear of love which is eerily beautiful in both its poetic lyrics and cinematic sound.
The band are currently touring the UK with Radidas and label mates LELO.
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Chapell - Ride.
Alan Chapell is a unique character – even by the quirky standards of the West Village, NYC. The product of years of traveling the world, honing his craft and moving seamlessly through musical genres, Chapell’s lush sonic pallet falls somewhere between the progressive pop rock of Bryan Ferry and the jangle rock nuance of 10,000 Maniacs.
Growing up on the “mean streets” of Stamford, Connecticut, Alan was something of a musical wunderkind - playing piano and trumpet before the age of six. He recorded with the legendary producer Jimmy Ienner at age 15, and more recently with Talking Head Jerry Harrison. He’s played to jam-packed houses around the world from Managua to Mumbai. It took Chapell a while to get to this point, but audiences across the U.S. are starting to take notice in a big way.
One of the more interesting things about Chapell is that, in addition to his musical successes, he’s carved out a niche advising tech companies on privacy issues. When the producers of HBO’s Silicon Valley consider creating a character to lampoon your role as chief privacy guru for dozens of tech companies, you know you’ve made it. Chapell has started drawing comparisons to Roger McNamee’s Moonalice as each has a foot firmly planted in both the tech and music worlds - and each are vocal critics of the privacy practices of Facebook.
Chapell’s newest LP, Penultimate, is the closest he’s come to bridging his innate musicality with the perspective gained wading neck deep through the rise of the Internet age. Chapell’s music evokes the naïve optimism of the early days of “new media” and juxtaposes that with the current state of constant surveillance. “Ride,” the first song on Penultimate, somehow manages to be both optimistic and dark. Similarly, in “I am Zuck,” he parodies the never-gonna-happen confession of Mark Zuckerberg; at times using Zuck’s own words to take him down. And if you’ve paid any attention at all to what’s currently taking place in the tiny Central American country of Nicaragua, you’ll find “Sandinista” to be nothing short of chilling.
On making music in 2019 Chapell now says, “I feel like I’m discovering myself as an artist in a way I never could have earlier in my life. For too long, I bought into the notion that I couldn’t become a successful artist after age 30 – and it was liberating to recognize how foolish that was. The most invigorating thing is that I don’t feel I’ve written my best song yet.”
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'Bankquilizer' from Catacomb Saints is atmospheric and simmers with restrained power, the mixture of post punk and sonic exploration both musically and vocally gives this song some rotatable edge.
Michael Paul Lawson has released the song 'Memories And Throttle' a refined singer songwriter piece his vocals are perfect for folk orientated music as they convey emotion and earnest feeling.
We first featured Keøma in April this year and they return with 'Young' accompanied by a video, their fresh and extremely catchy music once again proving hard to resist.
'Autumn Jam' by Glass Mountain is a hook laden indie rocker, the bands natural delivery and level of distinct overall sound, helps them stand out in what is a crowded music genre.
The overall production and resulting sound on Chapell's latest song 'Ride' is a deliciously rich, the musical arrangement and backing vocals are superb and allow enough room for Alan Chapell's palpable voice to own the piece.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The fourth and final single from Erin Durant’s forthcoming ‘Islands,’ ‘Rising Sun’ is its raison d’etre, the grand statement that leads you by the hand into her sprawling, sun-dappled archipelago. Over a gently strolling guitar and muted toms, Durant sings ‘I’m going far, I’m going wide’, signalling her intention to embed you within her travelling time machine. A lesson in sophistication, ‘Rising Sun’ fuses strung-out trumpets with Durant’s balm-like voice. ‘Rising Sun’ is like the lavender you spread on your pillow to induce sleep. Lie with it, doze off and dream of magical lands.
Rarely does an artist appear, as if out of thin air, with a full body of work where lyrically lush songs carry you into other worlds as if they were your own. Erin Durant's second album, Islands is an odyssey of sorts, with songs that blur the line between reality and fiction. Produced by TV On The Radio’s Kyp Malone, the eight songs deliver clarity within mystery and adventure in their uncluttered vignettes.
Born and raised in New Orleans, Durant has been based in New York for over a decade, all the while keeping track of the intricacies of life surrounding her and diligently developing her craft as a songwriter and performer. Lyrically, she composes most songs on piano, songs that tend to unfold structurally like a memory or a scene from a movie. As a performer, Durant usually transports a 232-pound ¾ size piano to venues without one. To hear her play the instrument makes plain her case for the extra effort. Her music is rooted in an ongoing dialogue between the physicality of her playing and the high, clear tone of her voice. Enmeshed with one another, it’s a display of an artist in full possession of herself and vision.
Islands sprawls out in front of you, weaving disparate stories into an overarching narrative. The songs touch on the ability to find meaning in minutiae. On “Take A Load Off” Durant tells a story of a weary traveler disoriented but pulled into revelry in an attempt to assuage their loss. The titular track “Islands” takes a similar tact, focusing on the conflicting process of attempting to find joy when joy seems lost. Islands is a continuously shifting landscape, with a knowing nod to the inevitability of these shifts.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Catacomb Saints share their new atmospheric post-punk meets folk single "Bankquilizer". Regarding the song, the band stated ""Bankquilizer" is a hypnotizing post-punk ballad of greed and violence, sung in a visceral style inspired by Nick Cave and the falsetto of Klaus Nomi. This song is a call to arms to rise up and not be tranquilized by banks and good ol’ boys. We recorded this long distance between LA and Edmonton, but that distance pales in comparison with the distance between the oppressor and the oppressed."
Catacomb Saints is Neil Holyoak (Holy Oak) and synth artist Devon Beggs. They recorded their first song in a cave in Banff, Alberta. Neil was burnt out on folk music and could only sing one line over and over again. They traveled through the Canadian Rockies in mid-winter to seek inspiration in a dank dark cave.
Immersed in the unusual environment and through sonic experimentation, they began a new composition. Playing the entire cave like a giant instrument, they used the natural reverberation to create a sonic landscape. Neil began making records in Montreal under the band name Holy Oak in 2007. Inspired by poets such as Thich Nhat Hahn, Rabindranath Tagore and Tomas Tranströmer, Neil’s fascination lies with the dark undercurrent of the subconscious.
Devon’s background is visual art, but his work in performance and video led him to experiment with synthesizers and homemade instruments. He uses a process based approach to synthesis and composition, in the spirit of Brian Eno or John Cage. Catacomb Saints release their EP, Cruel as the Grave, on June 14th, 2019. They’re currently working on their first full length album, which they’re recording at their studio on a small island in the Pacific Northwest.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael Paul Lawson was born into a deeply musical family, with generations of band leaders, classically trained academics, and brass band legends before him. While his early inclinations were to follow in their footsteps, his contentious relationship with his father and the urgings of his family to pursue more lucrative career paths, dampened his musical ambitions. Trading in the rust of northern New York for the luster of Long Island’s gold coast, Lawson set his artistry to the side in pursuit of corporate life. Eight years later, saddled with student loan debt and weary from the relentless New York City grind, Lawson moved, on a whim, to Norfolk, VA.
In Norfolk Lawson found space and clarity. He could watch the sunrise over the Atlantic and the sunset across the Blue Ridge Mountains in the same day. In Virginia the music started to flow. Plain-spoken ballads with deceptively straight-forward lyrics. A mix of beautiful prose and raw realities, conjuring up the early work of Jason Isbell and the slow burning, sobering lyrics of John Prine. Lawson was soon singing these songs in breweries and bars across Virginia, working it out, making up for lost time.
A disciplined artist with a punch-clock work ethic, Lawson began building a reputation as one of the most prolific writers and performers in the area, and he quickly began securing notable slots at the Norfolk Folk Festival and providing opening support for The Steel Wheels, and Sons of Bill. Eventually, his songs reached producer Daniel Mendez (Noah Gundersen, The Native Sibling) who offered Michael a development deal and an invite to track a debut EP in Austin.
Returning to Austin, where Lawson spent childhood summers visiting his father, was cathartic. It had been 16 years since Lawson was last in hill country, and 16 years since he last saw his father’s silhouette in the back of a squad car, when the constant drinking and violence came to a head in the Texas night, ultimately leading to their estrangement. It was an odd place to return now that he was carving out a new life path, but it also felt strangely in step with the material he had written for his debut EP, Some Fights You’ll Never Win. He was reconciling his relationship with his father, there in the flesh, and in the studio, as he committed his highly personal songs to tape. It was a healing experience, coming full circle, continuing the lineage of musical craftsmanship that had run in his family for generations.
“It’s taken a long time for me to get to where I should have been going from the start,” Lawson reflects. But taking the ‘back roads’ gave him the clear understanding, as the songs on Some Fights You’ll Never Win attest, that the most important battles to dive into are internal.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
KEØMA, the collaborative project between Sydney-born, Berlin-based multi-instrumentalist/producer Kat Frankie and Cologne-based singer-songwriter Chris Klopfer, have released their new album "Saudade" alongside a video for "Young".
"Young" is a summery jangle-pop number with a lo-fi video celebrating the carefree feeling of youth as the duo take a trip down memory lane. Clips of sandy beaches, ice-blue swimming pools and palm trees are composed together like flickering memories of a postcard from an unforgettable holiday.
Kat Frankie is a well-known character in the German music landscape via her soulful indie pop, dynamic live shows and collaborations with top-tier German acts (Clueso, Olli Schulz, Casper & Materia). Chris Klopfer hails from the indie rock world, writing in both English and German and duetting with some of Germany’s finest singer-songwriters (Gisbert zu Knyphausen, Moritz Krämer).
This fateful and organically evolving project came together after Klopfer caught a performance from Frankie and suggested they write a song together. The name originates from a Castellari Spaghetti-Western movie about a gunfighter who returns to his hometown only to find out that it’s been ravaged by plague and menaced by outlaws.
Saudade is the duo’s latest release; an album whose title suggests a longing for brighter seasons. Gone is the dusty melancholy of their previous offering - instead, a more blissful pop-focused chapter has opened up. The album was written and recorded in Berlin and though the artists are certainly in a happier space, Klopfer admits many of the lyrics reflect his homesickness for his hometown of Köln.
“Those songs are about yearning for a home or vacation, which came from feeling isolated in cold, big Berlin as a small town boy. Our Saudade is the strong desire for a place you can call home, with the people you love.” Saudade puts Klopfer’s honest lyricism and heartfelt vocals into focus, while honing in on Frankie producing. Their collaboration with Markus Ganter (Casper, Drangsal) brought their sound radiating more into the pop world, exactly how they wanted it to be.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bradford based four-piece Glass Mountain have released their new single ‘Autumn Jam’.
The single follows their EP ‘Wow & Flutter’ and lead single ‘Gin Flows Through My Veins’ and is a song about the joy and fear of love which is eerily beautiful in both its poetic lyrics and cinematic sound.
The band are currently touring the UK with Radidas and label mates LELO.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Alan Chapell is a unique character – even by the quirky standards of the West Village, NYC. The product of years of traveling the world, honing his craft and moving seamlessly through musical genres, Chapell’s lush sonic pallet falls somewhere between the progressive pop rock of Bryan Ferry and the jangle rock nuance of 10,000 Maniacs.
Growing up on the “mean streets” of Stamford, Connecticut, Alan was something of a musical wunderkind - playing piano and trumpet before the age of six. He recorded with the legendary producer Jimmy Ienner at age 15, and more recently with Talking Head Jerry Harrison. He’s played to jam-packed houses around the world from Managua to Mumbai. It took Chapell a while to get to this point, but audiences across the U.S. are starting to take notice in a big way.
One of the more interesting things about Chapell is that, in addition to his musical successes, he’s carved out a niche advising tech companies on privacy issues. When the producers of HBO’s Silicon Valley consider creating a character to lampoon your role as chief privacy guru for dozens of tech companies, you know you’ve made it. Chapell has started drawing comparisons to Roger McNamee’s Moonalice as each has a foot firmly planted in both the tech and music worlds - and each are vocal critics of the privacy practices of Facebook.
Chapell’s newest LP, Penultimate, is the closest he’s come to bridging his innate musicality with the perspective gained wading neck deep through the rise of the Internet age. Chapell’s music evokes the naïve optimism of the early days of “new media” and juxtaposes that with the current state of constant surveillance. “Ride,” the first song on Penultimate, somehow manages to be both optimistic and dark. Similarly, in “I am Zuck,” he parodies the never-gonna-happen confession of Mark Zuckerberg; at times using Zuck’s own words to take him down. And if you’ve paid any attention at all to what’s currently taking place in the tiny Central American country of Nicaragua, you’ll find “Sandinista” to be nothing short of chilling.
On making music in 2019 Chapell now says, “I feel like I’m discovering myself as an artist in a way I never could have earlier in my life. For too long, I bought into the notion that I couldn’t become a successful artist after age 30 – and it was liberating to recognize how foolish that was. The most invigorating thing is that I don’t feel I’ve written my best song yet.”
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