Bygone Shows

Come out for excellent Montreal bands, special guest Nat Baldwin, and of course Ryan Power!

Sister Suvi is a trio of ukulele, drums and guitar in which all three members sing. With folk lyricism, dancehall rhythms and art-rock radicality, their music is at once experimental and pop. Their dark and dreamlike lyrics often betray a macabre humour.

M G is a puppeteer originally from Vermont. She is a self-taught ukulele player and has an extensive history in vocal/a cappella musics. N D is a Toronto-based drummer immersed in that city's creative music and indie rock scenes. P G resides in Montreal and is a guitarist who moonlights on the bass clarinet. He also plays for the band Islands, and has made cameo appearances with the Bell Orchestre and Patrick Watson.

Shapes and Sizes inhabit a world in which humanity is stratified into three possible classifications; kindergarteners who don’t wear brand names, Dads who look like wild, forest dwelling warlocks, and undergrads who sometimes laugh aloud when alone in the school computer lab. If you don’t fit into one of these categories, we’re willing to bet you’re lying.

"Most Valuable Player": 7.9 / 10
"Upright bassist Nat Baldwin has his experimental bona fides in order. The first time I caught him live, he was playing a duet with Alex Mead on a DustBuster, and matched its on/off blasts with bowwork like a cat scratching through wicker... Yet when Baldwin turned to writing and performing songs, first documented on his excellent, dire EP Lights Out, he held his improvisational chops in check to write solo, static pieces with keening vocals and dire words. His songbook has gotten catchier with time, and on his new release Most Valuable Player, he brings fierce performances to these polished compositions... His musical imagination is expansive, while his lack of pretense is admirable. He doesn't even make you flinch when you read that "Look She Said"'s lyrics come from the titles of Morton Feldman and Christian Wolff compositions; and in fact, the lyrics throughout the album are brief and strong. Reports from his latest tour say that the band takes wild free excursions off this material. But capturing his work on record, Baldwin hones his work to the starkest moments: an urge by the lake, a bloodstained footprint, a whistling bow in an empty room."
-Pitchfork Media

"Because Baldwin, whose virtuosity on the hardwood was enough to make college recruiters swoon up until he chose to pursue music instead, is about to make most everybody's ears do the same. The New Hampshire-native (and Anthony Braxton disciple) rains hyper-melodic chamber fire, three choice cuts of which are now available here in all their melismatic, cinematic glory. Hold them. Love them. Cherish them."
-RCRD LBL on "Lake Erie," "One Two Three" and "Mask I Wear"

"It seems as though Nat Baldwin is sharing all of his personal secrets with us, and it's uncomfortably beautiful."
-Tiny Voices

Ryan Power's music does not read as indie rock which basically means white rock at this point (see S/FJ's A Paler Shade Of White if you haven't already); it doesn't read as indie rock which arguably really isn't rock. Not because of cellos or loop pedals or toys or arpeggio-heavy arrangements instead of regular whatever but because of no good-old-American miscegenation.

Ryan's music doesn't read as white but it doesn't exist in some "post-racial" neutral zone either. It mixes like they used to do. It's not "eclectic", it's not "postmodern", it's rock 'n roll, it's hip hop.

Ryan was born with a deep feeling for black music (blues, soul, Hendrix) and the level of soulful nuance he can conjure is so FUNKY the mind blinks alive and a minimal dance twitches into the leg. Of course he's a sensible liberal but this isn't politics, it's feel.

Perhaps ironically, as a reluctant jazz student at the University of New Hampshire in the 90s (fear of a life at the Merrimack gas pump led him to the music program at the state school which he never really enjoyed) he tended toward white jazz (west coast shit, Bill Evans) and dude even liked James Taylor. He's just following his ear; the economical grooves of these white players just appealed to him. Also Brazilian shit big time, more and more Latin American sounds appear in his music, bossa nova lately giving way to outright salsa.

Look, Ryan is just a better musician than most of us and also not a chicken about just liking what he likes regardless of the current fashions which we're getting too fucking old (32) to give the shit about we never did anyway in our better moments. The best of a world of rhythm and harmony (like Lennon or rap his melodies mostly spaceship the maps of the former and latter networks) just comes out, borrowed and changed in new ways you didn't think of.

Fuck indie rock. Long live the elegant mixmasters: slender, subtle, sexy, and killing with all the new guns which aren't guns. Is It Happening? Yes.

(from Camp Studio)