Archives: Alumnus

Her sultry and exquisite psychedelic soul is contemporary pop’s best-kept secret, a landscape where quiet storms hover and glide over endless fields of deep, funky hooks. But with the release of Blueberry’s self-titled debut on Sundazed’s Euphoria! Imprint, it’s a secret that won’t remain so for much longer. Blueberry has released three previous albums on her own label and makes music well described by Time Out New York as “the illegitimate offspring of Prince and Kate Bush.” Composed and performed in an all-analog setting using Fender Rhodes and Wurlitzer electric pianos, analog organs, live horns and vintage drum machines, Blueberry features a guest appearance by Soul Asylum main man Dave Pirner and pairs the warm, classic sound of Snyder’s timeless influences with a decidedly modern sensibility-and puts pretty much anything else on the current pop radar to shame. Just surrender your ears to the looping, neo-soul groove of “Fickle”, the coy, Burt Bacharach-tinged “I Adore You,” or the brass-blasting dance-floor mover “Grubby Wire” and Blueberry will be bumping, thumping, and grooving its way to the top of your best-of-2016 list quicker than you can yell get down!

www.blueberrylounge.com

Errorarias (Adam Zaretsky and Kira deCoudres) play out on the Errorarium improvising analog signal processed remash and live sources to create a concert for humans, posthumans, transhumans and non-humans. Public invited to entertain live flies and plants. The Errorarium is an audio-photonic enrichment terrarium meant to house organisms and subject them to tests for photosynthetic and sonic engagement. The light and sound synthesizer has many dials that alter the environment of the growing organisms resulting in FIST.SAVE.MOP.BAIT or Forced Interspecies Transgenic Solar Animal Vegetable Environmental Microinjection Organismic Personality Behavioral Audio Integrity Test. Kira deCoudres, psychoacoustics, cybernetic technologies, and sensory manipulation remix artist https://soundcloud.com/morenonsense Adam Zaretsky, analog synth bioartist http://ja-natuurlijk.com/site2/adam-zaretsky/ Errorarium Architecture and Fabrication: Mason Juday http://masonyte.com/ Errorarium Experimental Light Synthesizer Engineer: Pete Edwards of Casper Electronics http://casperelectronics.com/

http://ja-natuurlijk.com/site2/adam-zaretsky/

The Begotten is a celebrated mix of thrash and death metal with a touch of some old school face breaking hardcore style topped off with black metal inspired vocals courtesy of a total death worshiping female.

Kingston N.Y.’s favorite sons. Equal parts rock, headache and hangover..take our word for it…

Tele Novella rose from the ashes of indie darlings Voxtrot and Agent Ribbons. Blending Texas charm and West Coast vogue, Tele Novella’s music conjures images of John Wayne in thick-frame glasses.

https://telenovella.bandcamp.com/

Hailed by Rolling Stone as “a genre unto herself,” composer and guitarist Kaki King is a true iconoclast. Over the past 12 years the Brooklyn-based artist has released 8 extraordinarily diverse and distinctive albums, performed with such icons as Foo Fighters, Timbaland, and The Mountain Goats, contributed to a variety of film and TV soundtracks including Golden Globe-nominated work on Sean Penn’s Into The Wild, and played to an increasingly fervent following of music lovers on innumerable world tours. Her latest work, “The Neck Is A Bridge To The Body,” is Kaki at her visionary best: deconstructing and redefining the role of solo instrumental artist though virtuoso technique, insatiable imagination, and boundless humanity. This groundbreaking new multi-media performance uses projection mapping to present the guitar as an ontological tabula rasa in a creation myth unlike any other, where luminous visions of genesis and death, textures and skins, are cast onto her signature Ovation Adamas guitar which has been customized specifically for this production. In addition to her own solo work, Kaki sometimes performs accompanied by NYC-based string quartet ETHEL. She has also performed at Carnegie Hall, premiering a classical piece commissioned by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang.

http://www.kakiking.com/

Chris Maxwell’s debut album, Arkansas Summer, which John Burdick in the Almanac Weekly described as “…masterful Baroque Americana,” began in a makeshift studio in an Airstream trailer parked in Maxwell’s backyard in Woodstock, New York. The dark confessionals of his childhood are stories of tragedy, triumph, abuse, addiction and redemption, all presented with indelible guitar hooks and artfully turned lyrics. “When the drum becomes the drummer,” Maxwell sings in the jagged title track, “she beats down like an Arkansas Summer,”Chris made his name playing perhaps the furthest thing from wistful Americana — in the ’90s, he made catchy, jagged junkyard rock with the legendary New York band Skeleton Key. Before that, he was the principal songwriter and clever guitarist of Little Rock, Arkansas’ first band to be signed to a major label, the Gunbunnies, whose Southern Gothic jangle the L.A. Times characterized “…as if the Beatles met Faulkner on E Street.” Maxwell now works out of his new Goat House Studio in Woodstock, where he composes and records music for hit TV shows like Bob’s Burgers and Inside Amy Schumer, as well as producing and writing music for other artists (They Might Be Giants, Iggy Pop, Yoko Ono, the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion) as part of the celebrated production team The Elegant Too. . “A beautifully poised grown-up album in an age that still coughs one up from time to time.” Jonathan Lethem

http://maxwellsongs.com

It could almost be inferred that Jesse Marchant wrote the songs for his most recent album over a period of months in NYC during which a lot of his world had come out from under him, in what he has described as “a general period of falling outs, absence + abuse, both of self and of what should or could have been surrounding”. But in the process of finding an end to that Marchant feels to have grown. One is not left to wonder why he chose to drop the moniker of his former releases (his initials JBM) for the use of his proper full name, nor why his voice + lyrics, recorded with a mouth-to-ear intimacy, emphasizing his deepening + wearying baritone, sit loud + naked atop the widescreen backdrop of the deep synthesizer + orchestral pads + arrangements, often reminiscent of “I’m on Fire” era Springsteen. There is a sense of wanting to take responsibility + a desire to have things seen and said clearly for what they are, directly. The songs that make up this eponymous album are menacing, dreamy worlds of their own, each one unique for each listener, instantly relatable + surprisingly therapeutic: Marchant’s revelations are infectious. He is processing internal + external problems that aren’t just personal but feel like signs of our times, and in doing so has created an album that feels particularly important, relevant, + powerful.

http://www.jbm-music.com/

Norwegian singer/songwriter, musician and film score composer who lives in Brooklyn, NY.

http://www.sondrelerche.com/

Megan Jean and the KFB, or Klay Family Band, arrange a demented blend of americana, punk, dance, and the avant-garde that they’ve taken to describing as, “a metal band, if it was 1927.” Inventive percussion, electrified banjo, and a voice like the Devil Herself have earned Megan Jean and the KFB a dedicated following all over the East Coast. Calling the road home on a “never-ending tour,” this transient married duo has taken their nomadic musical lifestyle and transformed it into a kind of Voodoo that unites scenes, fans, and musical styles. This is a band that lives to perform, and is fueled by sheer guts and know how.

www.meganjean.net