Echolocations 5.5: Flood, Jan/Feb 2008

Clear Tigers
Catbird Records
Clear Tigers is Nathan Akin, Catherine Herrick, Jeremy Hunt Schoenherr-Lachance, David Sanderson and Tim Traynor. Nathan Akin initially moved to New York from Arkansas to study with minimalist composer La Monte Young. After many hours of exposure to Dream House drones, Nathan wrote and recorded a handful of songs and recruited a group of friends to help perform them. These four songs were released by Catbird Records last year and have already sold out of them. The four tracks demonstrate an artist with a knack for writing beautiful songs and leave the listener in eager anticipation for their debut full-length which has just been released and can be ordered from their website.

Leonardo Paniagua
iASO Records
Bachata began with the death of a dictator, wrestled with social stigma, and wound up with international fame thanks to an electric guitar advent. But before bachateros plugged in, they performed acoustic guitar music at rural dance parties and in urban cabarets of ill repute. Marginalized by the Dominican elite, it became the wildly popular soundtrack of the street. The assassination of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo in 1961 led to a minor explosion in guitar music recordrings. During his regime, Trujillo had favored accordion-based Merengue over other guitar-driven genres, which were associated with the lower-class and rural communities that Trujillo despised. Subsequently, Bachata records were sold through mom-and-pop shops. Only one national radio station, Radio Guarachita, regularly aired Bachata, part of the station's unique role as a bridge between rural and urban Dominicans. After several break through electric hits in the late 1980s, however, the older rootsier Bachata fell by the wayside. Thanks to producer Benjamin de Menil and iASO records for releasing 'Bachata Roja' and allowing this historic, acoustic, and catchy sound to be heard by international ears for the first time.

Beach House
Carpark Records
Feeling lonely tonight? Turn off the TV and lower the lights. Baltimore duo Beach House have returned with their sophomore full length entitled 'Devotion'. Alex Scally and Victoria Legrand have written eleven delicate pop tunes about love, feeling, and, of course, devotion. Their new album is a surefire antidote to the winter blues. Beach House have developed their craft exponentially since their 2006 self-titled debut. The recording is crisper and the songs are fuller. This is a band that is taking the pop duo format to the limit. The argons, slide guitars and reverb are still there, but Beach House lay out some new sounds for their newest offering.


The Acorn
Paper Bag Records
The Acorn is the on-going musical project of Rolf Klausener, Jeff Debutte, Keiko Devaux, T.Jeffrey Malecki and Howie Tsui. The project began as the solo electro-acoustic work of Rolf in late 2002. Following several limited CD-R only releases, the band released a critically heralded tribute to the Outaouais region called 'The Pink Ghosts' in July 2004 on Ottawa's Kelp Records. In the fall of 2005 they released the 'Blankets! EP', it was a more melodically focused effort showcasing the bands emerging synthesis of experimental folk and pop. After a year of solid touring, and the addition of keyboardist Keiko Devaux, the band released the six-song 'Tin Fist EP' in early 2007 on Toronto's Paper Bag Records to warm reviews. The Acorn's newest full-length recording, 'Glory Hope Mountain', is a sprawling, biographical album based on the life of Rolf's mother, Gloria Esperanza Montoya. Armed with heart-drums, gut-strings, ukuleles and marimbas, The Acorn are guided by spirit voices and the rhythms of rivers.

Rafter
Asthmatic Kitty Records
'Rafter Roberts plays in indie pop band Bunky, pals around with Sufjan Stevens, and engineers albums by California bands like Black Heart Procession and Pinback. But "jingle writer" is his most salient CV line regarding his new album, 'Sex Death Cassette'. It's an eclectic reel of curios and bagatelles that stick in your head the way good jingles do, though since they aren't selling anything besides Rafter's sensibility, their compositional craftiness is wedded to a lo-fi humility. Some of them are just little jags of inspiration: "I Love You Most of All" is a half-minute refrain for spooky falsetto and awkward acoustic guitar, like a lost Shudder to Think interlude. "Cuddling Raccoons" is a minute-long burst of handclaps and knob-twiddled garage riffs. And "Adventures" is a verse in search of a chorus, with a tripping groove and hearty brass flares making its concise point.' –pitchfork

Cryptacize
Asthmatic Kitty Records
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. 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! 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.

Throw Me The Statue
Secretly Canadian
Throw Me The Statue was conceived and fronted by Scott Reitherman, 'Moonbeams', was constructed with the help of Casey Foubert (Sufjan Stevens, Pedro The Lion) to create a wondrous concoction of fuzzed out synths, brass ensembles and epic vocal melodies. While the front of the album is nothing short of the next evolution of skewed Northwest bombast the second half displays an unexpected maturity in young Reitherman. The title track oozes down tempo vulnerability while the closer, "The Happiest Man On This Plane" combines the best of Reitherman's predecessors Phil Elvrum and Dave Bazan. TMTS's live show has been described as 'Wildly energetic. Live drums, electric guitars, and four-part harmonies replace Reitherman's multitracking, and the able, athletic band switch instruments, add extra percussion, and throw in melodica and glockenspiel with an abandon grounded by serious musicianship.' (The Stranger, 2007)

Prairie Cat
Catbird Records
Vancouver's Prarie Cat plays up shimmery, light-hearted pop tunes on his debut release ATTACKS! (Fuzzy Logic/Catbird). Aptly named after solo artist Cary Pratt, Prairie Cat will fill your ears and your hearts with the warmth of his familiar songs which were recorded in both the comforts of his bedroom and BC's burgeoning Hive Studios. The songs, mixed by Ryan Dahle (Limblifter/Age of Electric), utilize the triumphant sounds of rhodes piano, drums, vibes, glokenspiel, hand claps, ouu's and ahh's, guitar, bongos and bass.

Steve Reid Ensemble
Domino Record Co.
Bronx-born drummer Steve Reid has been journeying through the inner and outer reaches of the rhythmic universe for an unbelievable five decades. Reid grew up in the middle of the black renaissance in New York where he lived across the street from Thelonius Monk. Later when his family moved to Queens his new neighbor was John Coltrane, with whom, for a period he visited and played with everyday. Reid got his first gig at 17 when the drummer for Martha and the Vandellas didn't show up for a gig at his school. She ended up keeping him on for tours and a few recordings. Reid was also a member of the Black Panther party. In the late '60s he 'reversed the slave trip' by taking a 17 day cargo ship back to Africa, where he lived for three years, playing with Fela Kuti and the Sierra Leone Refugee all-stars. Shortly upon his return Reid was thrown into jail for resisting the Vietnam draft. There he taught black history and music to his fellow inmates. Upon his release Reid began to play more avant-garde drum rhythms starting with Sun Ra and Charles Tyler and then with his own ensemble. Fast forward a few decades and many musical accomplishments later Steve Reid and Kieran Hebder traveled to Senegal to record 'Daxaar'. Reid’s goal is that 'bringing music to the people' can help solve the world’s problems. All he wants is people to dance to Jazz again.

Marla Hansen
Standard Recording Co.
Marla Hansen writes songs for herself and her viola. A quiet performer, she has been known to tame an entire noisy bar with a single song. She recently purchased a guitar in Berkeley, California, and though she does enjoy all those extra strings, she will never give up her viola and its lovely melancholy nature. Her debut EP, entitled 'Wedding Day', includes six original songs and features performances from Sufjan Stevens, Sebastian Krueger, Nate Lithgow, and many more.

Bon Iver
Jagjaguwar Records
Bon Iver (pronounced: bohn eevair; French for 'good winter' and spelled wrong on purpose) is a greeting, a celebration and a sentiment. It is a new statement of an artist moving on and establishing the groundwork for a lasting career. 'For Emma, Forever Ago' is the debut of this lineage of songs. As a whole, the record is entirely cohesive throughout and remains centered around a particular aesthetic, prompted by the time and place for which it was recorded. Justin Vernon, the primary force behind Bon Iver, seems to have tested his boundaries to the maximum, and in doing so has managed to break free from any pre-cursing or finished forms. Vernon moved to a remote cabin in the woods of Northwestern Wisconsin at the onset of winter. He lived there alone for three months, filling his days with wood splitting and other chores around the land. This solitary time slowly began feeding a bold, uninhibited new musical form. The days slowly evolved into nights filled with twelve-hour recording blocks, breaking only for trips on the tractor into the pines to saw and haul firewood, or for frozen sunrises high up a deer stand. All of his personal trouble, lack of perspective, heartache, longing, love, loss and guilt that had been stockpiled over the course of the past six years, was suddenly purged into the form of song.