LPR’s INDIEROUND series features fresh indie rock and pop artists in a uniquely immersive setting: the venue’s one-of-a-kind circular stage. With artists performing “in the round” while surrounded on all sides by the audience, the series offers a perspective and experience that literally has cutting-edge and inspiring live music as its central focus.

The Luyas official site | The Luyas on Facebook | The Luyas on Bandcamp | The Luyas on Twitter

The Luyas are a band from Montreal, Quebec. They have been playing music together since 2006. What began as a collaboration between Jessie Stein, Pietro Amato, and Stefan Schneider shifted over the years to include Mathieu Charbonneau, Bucky Wheaton and Michael Feuerstack. Through many tours and personnel adjustments, no love has been lost between these friends. The band’s new album, Human Voicing is a leap of faith taken together by all 6 musicians.

Jessie’s unexpected turns and feely rhythms on guitar, bass and keys are much of what gives the music its particular character. Pietro forms the sonic and harmonic foundation with keyboard and horn tones that run the spectrum from warm and mysterious to dark and confusing. The double drum foundation of Bucky and Stef was key to the improvisations that generated the songs. Michael alternates between darting brush strokes and enveloping open guitar chords, providing a sense of spatial depth. All of these core elements, and the occasional otherworldly flourish of Mathieu’s modular synth, are brought into unlikely focus by Stein’s fauvist and fractured lyrical perspective – resulting in a unique psychedelia.

This odd collaboration has yielded a lot of truly magical and weird music. While the result can loosely be described as rock music, the band is spirited and impressionistic by nature – always making priorities of curiosity and inventiveness in order to make something soulful and surprising.

Human Voicing was made at Breakglass Studios with nothing but the loosest of outlines and a few skeletal sketches. Along with 2016’s Says You EP, the new album was produced and mixed by the inimitable Jace Lacek (Besnard Lakes). Together they mark the band’s first releases since 2012’s “Animator”.

Zula official site | Zula on Facebook | Zula on Bandcamp

Brooklyn’s Zula plays hypnotic, groovy pop music with a dose of noise and psychedelia. Their debut, This Hopeful, caught listeners’ attention with its personal voice and propulsive, expansive production. On Zula’s latest album, Grasshopper, out now via Inflated Records, cousins Henry and Nate Terepka craft songs with reflective, suspended moods, over a heavily rhythmic sound. Grasshopper navigates many different territories – the band foregrounds texture, but has a singer-songwriter orientation; the album pulls from dance music, post-punk and art rock, but resists stereotypes. Both funky and introspective, Zula’s music hovers invitingly for the curious listener.

The songs on Grasshopper, which were produced by Henry and Nate and mixed by Jake Aron (tUnE-yArDs, Jamie Lidell), combine wildly processed sounds with welcoming detail. Engineered by Jonathan Low (Miner Street Recordings, Philadelphia) and Kevin Harper (Warner Brothers Studios, Nashville), the longtime collaborators manipulated live band performances, adding layers and treatments. Emotive vocal harmonies were tempered with an effected, unnatural grit. The production has a re-sampled 70’s-90’s influence, informed by an acoustic guitar strumming along to a mangled James Brown loop.

Zula has built a strong reputation performing in DIY spaces across the city and country. In a live setting, the four-piece opens up their tracks, allowing them to breathe and take off on unexpected tangents. Propelled by energetic, elastic grooves, Zula is known for a polished show that sounds a little different each time.

“To listen to a Zula track is to get lost in a world of the band’s own creation — a groovy, hypnotic space in which the answers to difficult questions start to become clearer as the bass pounds against your chest and the rhythmic percussion propels you forward.”
– Consequence of Sound

“New York psych-pop explorers Zula aren’t easy to pin down, but while their sound shifts track to track, there is a beautiful coherence to an album like This Hopeful.”
– SPIN

“Pointillistic structures with a mainspring of Minimalism.”
– Jon Pareles, The New York Times

Casey Dienel official site | Casey Dienel on Twitter | Casey Dienel on Facebook | Casey Dienel on Instagram

Casey Dienel is a producer, singer and songwriter who under her given name and the moniker White Hinterland has released 4 critically acclaimed full-length albums. Raised in New England she has spent the last ten years creating music Nylon Magazine describes as “wild, vicious, poetic, feminine, brash, and singular.” On 2014’s White Hinterland release Baby Rolling Stone declared her vocal acrobatics “riveting—the music equivalent of pulling a floor lamp out of a handbag.” Employing multilayered vocals and a battery of synths, she has crafted a sonic world all her own. She divides her time between her studios in Scituate, MA and Brooklyn, NY.