Kaki King official site | Kaki King on Facebook | Kaki King on Twitter | Kaki King on Instagram

“a shockingly gifted, stunningly complex performer who’s just slightly out of place in too simple a setting.” – LA Times

“Watching Kaki King perform is like seeing guitar-playing for the first time… The effect is of sculpting rather than of playing music.” – NY Mag

“bare, powerful, and propulsive.” – KUTX Austin

Hailed by Rolling Stone as “a genre unto herself,” Brooklyn-based composer and guitarist Kaki King has released 8 albums over the past 13 years. She has performed on every continent over the course of multiple world tours, and has presented her work in a variety of prestigious arts centers, including the Kennedy Center, MoMA, LACMA and The Met. She has created music for numerous film and TV soundtracks, including “August Rush” and Sean Penn’s “Into the Wild”, for which received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Original Score.

Her most recent work until now, “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.

Delicate Steve official site | Delicate Steve on Facebook

When the world first met Delicate Steve in 2011, Steve Marion and the band he principled were an artfully crafted fiction. Tasked with introducing Wondervisions, Delicate Steve’s beguiling debut record of highly evocative and emotionally concise guitar-driven songs, Luaka Bop, the seminal David Byrne-owned New York indie label, balked. There was the music to get to; itself essentially reference-less and unqualifiedly unique. But what of the guy who created it? The guitarist who wrote the whole thing, who played every instrument. An enormous unknown talent without an attendant backstory to match the spectral and boundless qualities of his music. Enter Chuck Klosterman. The celebrated writer was brought on to completely fabricate a biography based on a band and album he was asked not to listen to.

While the record racked up high praise from outlets including The New York Times and NPR, nearly everything music fans read about Delicate Steve was a fiction. Listeners were left to the music alone to determine who Steve was.

As is often the case, some of the first people to recognize Delicate Steve’s music were fellow artists who became vocal supporters, as the young guy from upstate New Jersey began to develop a growing fanbase in small New York clubs like Glasslands, Union Pool, and Mercury Lounge. Following the 2012 release of Positive Force, Delicate Steve had cornered the status of ‘your favorite band’s favorite band’, as Steve himself became a fixture in and an on-demand collaborator among disparate scenes, players, and bands, making some of the most celebrated and forward thinking music today: Co-signs and work with David Byrne, Dirty Projectors, tUnE-yArDs, Mac DeMarco, Dr. Dog, and elder statesmen like Lee Ranaldo and Built to Spill. Likely the only guitarist alive who will cut records with Sondre Lerche and Death Grip’s Zach Hill. Handpicked to open a sold out North American tour for Tame Impala. And most recently, providing guitar on Paul Simon’s new record.

These wild artistic relationships came to be because Steve happens to be one of the most talented songwriters and guitarists currently working. But they are also a direct reflection of the person, the soul of a guy any artist or fan who’s met him will identify immediately. It’s the same soul that fills his songs.

This is Steve, Delicate Steve’s first new record in 4 years, and first for the ANTI- imprint, is an articulation of this spirit. Joy. Love. Positivity. Perseverance. Meditation. A general communion with the people and world around him. Easy to call such things hackneyed in this cynical time, but in Steve’s case, it’s very hard to separate the person from the art. It’s real. It’s pure. This, is Steve.

Melody begins with the needle drop on This is Steve, and it’s this hallmark as a songwriter on display in tune after tune that has defined all of Delicate Steve’s work. It’s his incredible capacity to write wordless songs that are impossible not to sing along to. He works in no genre, there are no words, but there is never a question as to what he is saying.

Tunes like “Animals,” “Help,” and “Nightlife,” establish their hooks immediately, and drop you with Steve as he runs alongside leopards, scales a Western peak, nurses a boozy Kingston come-down, before clocking out at under three minutes and depositing you somewhere else on a technicolor continuum. Throughout the set, Steve’s guitar melodies rise and crest, unguarded expressions of wonderment and positivity.

Steve produced and played all the instruments on this record. He created it as an introduction from himself to you, and named it appropriately. If there is a question as to who This is Steve’s creator is, you’ll find it imbued in these ten songs. As he has done from the start, Steve lets the music speak for itself. Without a word.

Mat Hall
August 22 2016

Tigue official site |Tigue on Twitter | Tigue on Facebook | Tigue on Instagram | Tigue on Soundcloud

Tigue is a group of three percussionists with a fluid musical identity. The Brooklyn-based trio (Matt Evans, Amy Garapic and Carson Moody) makes their own kinetic and hypnotic blend of instrumental minimalism while opening up the possibilities of their instrumentation through commissioning and collaboration. Tigue’s debut album Peaks was released in 2015 with New Amsterdam Records with highlighted performances at the Ecstatic Music Festival, Bric Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival, and the Zemlika Festival in Durbe, Latvia. Recent commissions and premieres have included works by Molly Herron, Randy Gibson, Jason Treuting, Adrian Knight and Robert Honstein alongside collaborative ventures with Kid Millions and visual artist / sculptor Michael Mercil. These works have been presented in concert halls, galleries, black box theaters and universities throughout the country including EMPAC, Roulette, The deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Noguchi Museum, Yale School of Music, and Princeton University.  Praised for their focused and “high octane” performances (New York Times), the Ohio-born band members have worked together since they were practically children.

Along with performing, the members of Tigue are dedicated to outreach and community projects. In collaboration with Make Music New York, the trio has led three 10-week music education programs with adult and adolescent inmates at New York City’s Rikers Island Correctional Facility, featured in both the New York Times and Rolling Stone Magazine. Working with inmates in both men’s and women’s facilitates, the trio shared the communicative nature of music through West African musical traditions and hand drumming culminating with inmate performances for the Rikers population.  Tigue has also presented workshops and masterclasses with collegiate universities, elementary classrooms and community groups across the globe.

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This past spring Tigue events included a Carnegie Neighborhood series performance in the Bronx premiering the latest movement of Jason Treuting’s piece 9 numbers, a trip to Boston, MA to perform on the Celebrity Series “Stave Sessions “ with fellow Brooklyn trance inducers Innov Gnawa, the premiere of Randy Gibson’s “The Four Pillars Appearing from The Resonating Discs invoking The 72:81:88 Confluence in a setting of Quadrilateral Starfield Symmetry ATS4 Base 6:81” with the Avant Media Festival, a weekend in Columbus, OH performing the latest version of Michael Mercil’s “Thoreau’s Desk” and a week long workshop and performance of new music for new instruments with composer Molly Herron and instruments designed by Dartmouth College engineering students.

2016 was a busy year for Tigue. The ensemble appeared as part of the Ecstatic Music Festival, Avant Media Festival, American Music Festival, and Celebrate Brooklyn! Festivals where they performed new music of their own along with composers Adrian Knight and Jason Treuting. The group made their first trip to the West Coast, with help from the Permutations Series and the Center for New Music, and they flew to Latvia for their first international performance as part of the Zemlika Festival. In between these projects Tigue played intimate shows with their friends in the Brooklyn community, presented workshops and master classes for elementary school classrooms and ivy league institutions, and started recording their second album. Most recently, this past February, Tigue hosted a three week Sunday night residency at local Gowanus music venue Three’s Brewing, presenting concerts with Brooklyn community talents Alice Cohen, J. Hoard, Qasim Naqvi, LADAMA, Wilder Maker and Innov Gnawa.

Photo Credit: Catalina Kulczar

TEEN official site | TEEN on Facebook | TEEN on Tumblr | TEEN on Bandcamp | TEEN on Carpark Records

TEEN’s second album, 2014’s The Way and Color, was a stunning creative breakthrough. Singer and multi-instrumentalist Teeny Lieberson’s voice is starkly highlighted, but the whole record is a conversation between her; Katherine Lieberson’s crafty, minimalist drumming; Boshra AlSaadi’s lithe, sinuous bass lines; and Lizzie Lieberson’s irresistible synth hooks. Now the group is back with its strongest release to date: the third full-length of their discography, Love Yes.

Born out of a creative process that included a dismal winter workshopping in Woodstock, a writing renaissance for lead-singer Teeny Lieberson in Kentucky, and a triumphant return to home in Nova Scotia to record, Love Yes is a lush, bold new creation that builds upon the group’s previous efforts and takes off.

On the album cover, the quartet is bejeweled in crystals and bathed in Venusian red. This red is the color of vitality and pulsing life—unmistakable traits of Love Yes. It is the iconic red of Dorothy’s slippers and Eve’s apple—potent with society’s tales and notions of innocence lost. In Love Yes, something else more mysterious and tender is gained.

TEEN was founded in 2010 by lead-singer and multi-instrumentalist Teeny Lieberson (Here We Go Magic). She self-recorded and self-released the beguiling lo-fi Little Doods LP the following year, then formed a band that included sisters Katherine and Lizzie, and signed to Carpark for 2012’s In Limbo. Produced by Sonic Boom (Spectrum, Spacemen 3), In Limbo encompasses everything in between sprawling, ethereal ballads and trancey but kinetic pop. Rolling Stone listed its opening track “Better” as one of the “50 Best Songs of 2012.” The Carolina EP followed in 2013 and was even more varied and accomplished; the band was growing by breathtaking leaps and bounds. TEEN’s second full-length, The Way and Color, mixes the band’s melodic psych with the sound of post-millennial R&B. The LP has its share of darkness—fear, regret, and loss are all in the picture—but it’s always redeemed by the sheer soulfulness and powerful ingenuity of the music. The album is a reflection on the aggressive times we live in, one that often lacks selflessness. TEEN’s response is one that uplifts and brings a sense of happiness and joy. Love Yes continues this communication, this time exploring the disharmony and empowerment that both sexuality and spirituality can create within the modern woman’s psyche. Universal ideas of loyalty, pleasure, purity, power, aging, and love are confronted with a knowable specificity. There is a quality of wholesomeness, but also an edge—a kind of wise anger and electricity.

Photo credit: Hannah Whitaker

Anni Rossi official site | Anni Rossi on Facebook | Anni Rossi on Soundcloud | Anni Rossi on Twitter | Anni Rossi on Bandcamp | Anni Rossi on Instagram

Anni Rossi is a multi-instrumentalist and producer based in Brooklyn, New York known for crafting euphonious folk-pop and punk to lo-fi and dirty Aaliyah-inspired RnB mixtape with prank phone calls. She is notable for writing and performing with her one-of-a-kind electric viola that was handcrafted from a tree branch by her friend and former Swans percussionist Thor Harris. Rossiʼs unconventional performance style, which sees her plucking and strumming her viola like an electric-guitar has won praise from Pitchfork, who described it as “a huge part of her appeal… she emulates the sound of her ‘father shoveling snowʼ and ‘cars on icy packed roadsʼ with a fricative scrape of the strings.” Rossi has released several critically acclaimed EPs and albums, including 2009ʼs Rockwell, which was recorded in Chicago with engineer Steve Albini and released internationally by British record label 4AD. Her songs have appeared in episodes of Greyʼs Anatomy, Sirens and The Good Wife, and a large-scale theater work she composed with award-winning Marxist anthropologist Michael Taussig has been performed at New Yorkʼs Whitney Museum and Berlinʼs Haus der Kulturen der Welt.

Since parting ways with 4AD in 2011, Rossi has worked to expand her repertoire and find a wider frame of expression. She is now emerging from a period of playfully exploring several tangents of work woven by her creative instincts and raw responses to being human. With the help of Best Coast guitarist Bobb Bruno, she is currently putting the final touches on her third studio album which was recorded at his Yetiʼs Lair studio in Eagle Rock, California. The new work will see Rossi looking beyond the black and white framework that binds us to one another and exposing more of her emotional and mental interior.

Shahzad Ismaily was born in the States to Pakistani parents who emigrated here just before his birth. He grew in a bicultural household, always following a multitude of paths and perusals. He is mostly self-taught as a musician, composer, recording engineer, and producer. He primarily plays electric bass, drums, percussion, guitar, synthesizers, and all manner of sound-makers procured in life’s travels. He has recorded and performed with a diverse crew of artMakers, Yoko Ono, Laurie Anderson, Beth Orton, Colin Stetson, Ben Frost, Bonnie Prince Billy, Damien Rice, Jolie Holland, JFDR, Secret Chiefs 3, Sam Amidon, further and further. He has been an integral member of festival/residency/collective experiences such as the People Festival (the brainchild of Bon Iver, The National, and the Michelberger), the Eau Claires festival, the Moers Festival. He has done work for dance and theater pieces, such as the film Frozen River (Oscar-nominated and Sundance award-winning), Inkboat (a butoh crew from California/Switzerland), and visual artist Laleh Khorramian. This year alone, he’ll teach in residence at BANFF, the Oklahoma Center for Contemporary Arts, the Monheim Triennale, and very happily, the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Currently based in Brooklyn and working out of the recording studio collective he founded and created, Figure 8 Recording, he has studied music extensively in Pakistan, India, Turkey, Mexico, Chile, Japan, Indonesia, Morocco, and Iceland.

Indigo Street official site | Indigo Street on Facebook