2 Petes, 1 Canada... Spectre Folk hits the Golden Road with MV and EE

Spectre Folk will pay a visit to our neighbors to the north this weekend as a lean, mean, way zoned duo. They'll be hitting the streets of gold with good buddies and multiple label mates MV and EE. In spite of how they appear in the press photo below, Spectre Folk are just a couple of real friendly New York dudes who'd love to make some new friends in Canada. They won't hurt you. Come check em out in Montreal on Saturday and Toronto on Sunday.

SPECTRE FOLK & MV/EE IN MTL

Posted on August 16, 2011 by popcornsnaps| Leave a comment

For all our Montreal friends, a musical announcement...

>>Popcorn Youth presents…

SPECTRE FOLK [Brooklyn, NY]

with

MV+EE [Brattleboro, VT]

and

Les Momies de Palerme [Montreal]

at

La Brique / 6545 Durocher #402

9pm doors / 9:30pm start

Sliding scale $8-10

Saturday, August 20 / a night of gorgeous psychedelic folk, heavy drone jams + sudden pop exploration

We are so so excited and honored to welcome Spectre Folk to our city. Spectre Folk is led by Pete Nolan (of GHQ, Magik Markers, and Arbitrary Signs fame) and Peter Meehan (oh and their drummer is Steve Shelley – yes that Steve Shelley – of Sonic Youth!). Earlier this spring they celebrated their latest release, the EP “The Blackest Medicine, Vol. 2,” on Woodsist Records. This is going to be a really special night. PLEASE RSVP to me, natasha.pickowicz AT gmail DOT com to get your name on the guestlist as it is a private event. Thanks + hope to see you there!

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Posted in music, party, people

Tagged concert, la brique, mv/ee, psychedelia, spectre folk

SUNDAY, AUGUST 21ST @ Placebo Space (1409a Bloor St W) - 9pm - $8/$10 - All Ages

MV & EE (http://www.myspace.com/mveebummerroad)
Matt Valentine & Erika Elder return to Toronto in support of their new disc "Country Stash" and MV's solo record "What I Become". Total good vibes duo backed by Toronto's own Matt "Doc" Dunn (Transcendental Rodeo, 10,000 Watt Head) and Mike Smith (Muskox). Space psych meets americana, electric guitar textures float around languid drum beats. Real rambling folk jams get weirded out.

SPECTRE FOLK (www.myspace.com/spectreflux)
Pete Nolan of Magik Markers & GHQ brings his solo project to Toronto for the first time. Psych folk guitars crunching over waves of dissonance, a train driving forward into the atmosphere, only to slowly disintegrate as it enters. Hints of free music leanings show themselves as the psych rock freak out subsides & distant minimal sounds dot the aural landscape. Psych becomes free music drones and sweeps, the disassembly of it's elements in plane view. Don't sleep on this!

ERIC CHENAUX (http://www.myspace.com/ericchenaux)
Toronto experimental guitarists finds the beauty in sadness and the sadness in beauty. Pulling emotion out of the twang of his guitar strings, he crafts slow moving ballads, angular improvisations and bumping "blues" numbers. Lending is talents to such groups as The Reveries, Drumheller, The Allison Cameron band among others, Eric has been a mainstay in Toronto's avant-garde music scene, but has now set his sights across the Atlantic. Don't miss what is sure to be a beautiful performance & one of the last for a long while by a serious gem.

TRADITION (http://www.myspace.com/tradition)
Toronto singer/songwriter James Klassen really emotes a huge amount with his quiet spacious folk songs. Gently strummed guitar over longs droning hums, James' voice whispers & floats on top of it all effortlessly, accenting the warmth he produces with his guitar. You can feel his sincerity drifting out of his notes, a shinning example of less is more, Tradition's music is a real gem to be discovered. For fans of Wooden Wand!

United Waters in Pitchfork's Overlooked recs of 2011

Here's what Pitchfork's Marc Masters had to say about the Untited Waters record in Pitchfork's "best Overlooked recs of 2011":

United Waters: Your First Ever River [Arbitrary Signs]

The debut from Brian Sullivan's solo project United Waters can be as murky and dense as his primary concern, Mouthus. But Your First Ever River is also subdued and intimate. It sounds like Sullivan crafted these tunes in some kind of ocean-floor bedroom, building rolling melodies out of small fragments-- an acoustic strum, a two-note riff, a looping beat-- and creating his warmest, most inviting record to date. (Watch the video for United Waters' "Platetectonics" here.)

Isolated Markers Cassette review on Tiny Mix Tapes

Markers cassette got a rad review here:

Magik Markers
Isolated from Exterior Time 2010 a.k.a. Bonfire [CS]
[Arbitrary Signs; 2011]
http://arbitrarysigns.blogspot.com
By Squeo

As the title suggests, the Markers retreat from the Drag City limelight back into the womb, documenting the mitosis of their mind into a handful of rickety songs à la the 2007 flood of CD-Rs that paved the road to Boss. One track is indistinguishable from a Velvets bootleg; another sounds like the final beach blanket bingo party after the seas dry up; Bob Seger's "Ramblin', Gamblin' Man" isn't covered so much as prepped for alternative dental surgery; near the end of side A, the band works out a straight 90s driving anthem, yearning over the horizon on the chorus and birthing one of their best songs yet in the back room of a Stephen Chbosky-penned coming-of-age rager. All these tunes still have a ways to go, but in this age of straining neck muscles to reallyhear music like we're manning the boards at the INA-GRM, it's refreshing to hear something so rambling and janky, and it demonstrates what still seems so valuable about this band and its MO: an ever-evolving attempt to be honest and strong in the present environment, to inhabit the performance space as the same sloppy humans they were before pressing 'record' and, through the divining rod of inspiration, living their way into startling works of art.

ASCS008 Magik Markers "Isolated from Exterior Time" Cassette... get some basement clues to the Markers new direction... 60 minums long

prices

USA $8.00 Other Countries $12.00 USA $8.00

Also... don't forget to come see:

United Waters

Has everyone heard this record yet? It's really... really good... Check out this review from Dusted:

United Waters - "Platetectonics" (Your First Ever River)

As part of Mouthus, Brian Sullivan makes music that is too noisy and dense to be rock, too nimble and pulse-oriented to be noise, too primitive to get dubbed electro-acoustic or experimental. Similarly, it’s impossible to grip the seven pieces on Sullivan’s first solo LP under his United Waters moniker as anything concrete: Are they songs that spiralled out into jams, or jams that coalesced into songs?

It’s a tension he seems to relish, and it’s there from the first drop of the needle. Side A is dominated by the 11-minute suite, “My Geology I–IV,” and the title and length alone should clue you in to the polarities Sullivan is moving between. It’s intimate but maps out larger, unseen forces, a play of the personal and the primordial.

Likewise, his arrangements throughout the album set opposing forces against each other. The opening section of “My Geology” has a clean acoustic guitar backing a trembling, distorted voice, like a slightly more wasted version of Donovan’s “Hurdy-Gurdy Man.” “Platetectonics” continues this acoustic/electric binary, with an acoustic guitar keeping the pulse for Sullivan’s massed vocals while a drum loop and back-masked cymbal strike clatter in the background, seemingly out of time, as if they were meant for some other song but leaked into the mix.

This tape-saturated, murky fidelity is on every track here, but Sullivan uses its masking properties with purpose. By subtly disguising his instrumental sources and rearranging them in the stereo field, he gives them new life and frees up our associations for the bigger effect. Both versions of “Spires” feature a muted drum track that sounds like it was recorded in a separate room. On “Statuary.” a slide guitar emerges midway through, bringing light to the minor gloom of the track’s first half.

Like a Pollock painting, your first impression of all this murk and the discordant elements is of a sloppy mess, but closer inspection reveals a tangled, intuitive intelligence at work. Order emerges not by breaking it down into its constituent parts, but when you step back and appreciate it with a wide-screen gaze. Your First Ever River is an album you could tuck into the tradition of cloistered, lysergic bedroom missives running from Skip Spence and Syd Barrett through to Twenty Six and Six Organs of Admittance, but it could just as easily get cast as something outside of that lineage. Not truly Outsider, but at least sui generis, made without a thought of really belonging anywhere or to anything.

By Matthew Wuethrich

Spectre Folk NYC

Come check out the Spectre Folk band Tuesday night at Cameo Gallery... and see the solo jam this Saturday at the Stone courtesy of Carlos Giffone.