64 Results for : portland's

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    Stubborn Keys
    Sleepwalk Kid is a rock trio that mixes the raunchy assault of The Pixies and Smashing Pumpkins with the detailed songcraft of Wilco and Elliott Smith. Creating a sound for both thinkers and drinkers, Sleepwalk Kid is equally happy with a pounding punk-laced barrage or a subtle experimental groove. The band's first record "Stubborn Keys" will be released September 10, 2008 at Portland's Towne Lounge. It is the summer of 2008 and Sleepwalk Kid is emerging from hibernation. Members Tim Murphy, Nick Angelo, and Christian Pokorney have been honing their fuzz-rock sound for the better part of two years, forgoing a packed gig schedule for a meticulous experiment/practice/experiment routine. With shiny new record 'Stubborn Keys' in hand the band is arising from the basement into the bright, scary world. Ready to rock, of course. Sleepwalk Kid's 12-track debut 'Stubborn Keys' is a lesson in efficient rockage. The bulk of the recording was done in the classic 60's rock style-three guys playing very loudly together in one expensive-looking room. Most tracks were picked from three or four takes and all band performances were recorded over three days in March 2008. The resulting sound is minimalist yet muscular, an apt avenue for Sleepwalk Kid's mix of cerebral and manic tunes. As for the background, Murphy and Angelo have been producing original music since 1999. As teenage friends in suburban Portland, they would smuggle acoustic guitars to school and spend spare minutes between classes learning their favorite songs. When enough chords were learned, the duo began writing their own material. Eventually more musical comrades were enlisted and the sludge-rock group Chrysalis was formed in 2002. A live record was recorded and a handful of shows played, but teenage friends fell away as they tend to. Angelo and Murphy continued to write together and self-produced the record 'Stargazer' as the psych-rock duo Featherstone in 2003. While no band was formed to play the new songs, Murphy and Angelo played gigs as a duo. At this time they also joined with songwriter Mark Shifflett to form the roots-rock group RoughCuts, for which Angelo and Murphy produced the record 'The Unseen Sound' in 2005. New York transplant Christian Pokorney joined Murphy and Angelo in 2006 to form Sleepwalk Kid. Following a year of rehearsal and songwriting, the new band began performing in Portland clubs in 2007. With the September 2008 release of their full-length debut 'Stubborn Keys,' Sleepwalk Kid is currently looking play throughout the Northwest and stretch their cumulative creative muscles.
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    Growland
    A guitarist and songwriter traversing the realms of Hendrix, Funk, Afro-Carribean and Punk. John January played with many bands in Southern California before relocating to Portland Oregon. There, under the infuence of the natural beauty and thriving music scene the John January band formed, honing it's upbeat and danceable blend of jams through countless live dates. Drummer Ilko Major, Bassist Steve Kelly and Percussionist Dan Bamberger round out a line-up of Portland's best musicians.
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    Like This Forever
    Anyone remotely familiar with aQ knows we've long had a soft spot for earthy, psych-tinged music that weaves it's way along beautiful shadowy paths through the dewy glimmers and murky sludge. Well, here's something new that fits the bill and has been pleasing many an ear around here! We actually put a call out to these Portland, OR folks back in October to send some of their music down the coast. A few months have passed and here we are finally with cds in hand, and we think it was worth the wait! Heck, in the short time we've had Like This Forever in stock, in-store play has already been stirring up many many queries with at least one purchased each time it's spun. Stormy waves of electric guitar distortion and reedy woodwinds crash upon one another, then melt into clear smooth bell chimes. Horns and piano also enter the fray that ebbs and flows around mainman Eric Crespo's emotive vocals... As you listen you get a sense that Crespo and co. May have been raised on a balanced diet of Pink Floyd and Fleetwood Mac as well as Pavement and Slint. Yes, all the most nutritious and tastiest food groups! Recommended. -Aquarius Records (speaking of 'like this forever') __________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________ Review of 'like this forever' from Belgian blog Derives: I've been very impressed by the debut release of Ghost to Falco, the solo project of Eric Crespo. I was then very curious to discover his first full length and a little bit anxious about the fact he recorded it with a full set of guest musicians. Turning a solo project into a full band can corrode a sensitivity completely. There are differences, this album is less intimate and more intense, there is less space for layers of sounds from synths, organ or guitars and more attention towards a more rock-oriented approach. But while I'm talking about that he doesn't lose a single part of his authenticity as other artists like Unwound, Slint, Kickball, Three Mile Pilot, Victory at Sea, Bellafea, Lowercase or For Carnation easily come to mind when i listen to his new songs and band instrumentation. There is more room for tension ot this record, and for harsher sounds, even if it never falls into complete noisy explorations. He makes also a step towards a more conventional songwriting, following the archetypes of usual indie rock formula inherited from post-hardcore sources. I do like this new record quite a lot, even if I miss the unity once featured on the debut release. Eric Crespo is a true and clever songwriter and a brilliant interpreter of his own songs. There is no place for circus, you will taste the dust but ask for more of this. This is not a recommended record, this is a necessary one. I don't like it as much as I am obsessed by it. If once in your life records such as Spiderland, Repetition, The Dark is Just the Night, The Going-Away Present or Another Desert Another Sea have meant something for you, it is the next one on the list. --DERIVES.NET __________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________ '...Have you heard how good Eric Crespo's lyrics are? Have you heard their newish art-noise-gone-pop songs?' -The Portland Mercury __________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________ 'Swooping bass lines, feedback at odd intervals, slo-mo percussive riffs when the drums are playing, and the rare touch of horns--put like that, you might think it sounds like a bunch of gibbons loose in the studio, but Portland-based troubadour Eric Crespo manages to blend it all into a batch of sludge folk that alternately soothes and rattles the ears.' -Boise Weekly (from an album review of 'like this forever') __________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________ 'Eric Crespo is the constant member of Ghost to Falco, a Portland band-a trio on this tour -specializing in morose beauty and curious emotion. From lush analog synth sounds to looped and minimal drones, the sounds on the new disc 'Like This Forever' complement Crespo's pointed lyrics well.' -The Flagpole (Athens, GA)(Dec. 6, 2006 issue) __________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________ 'If the rock and indie camps have been increasingly segregated as of late, then this album could be the much needed catalyst to bring the two back together. Ghost to Falco singer/songwriter Eric Crespo seems comfortable in the role of composer of introspective lyrics, but also knows that heavy, cathartic rock 'n' roll is an important part of the emotional dynamic. Crespo's rock is Neil Young circa After The Gold Rush, with huge choruses and guitar chords that transition into textured and delicate sections with layers of organ, xylophone, brass and wind instruments. It's a recipe that is continuously intriguing throughout. The first songs on the album, "Light in the Wind" and "Maupin," gently ease the listener into Crespo's world, giving a false sense that it will be a quiet, introverted album in the vein of Pinback or The Shins. Subtly, cymbal crashes build into a fit of noise joined by staccato acoustic guitar and human wailing that sounds like a painful exorcism. The song ends with Crespo's bitter, scorned singing, "If there's an escape then it begins with beliefs," and a frustrated punk beat over open chords. The strongest track is "The End," which begins with a riff constructed of what sounds like a guitar being played backwards and punctuated with a stirring Young-esque harmonica lead. The drums are hard-hitting and aggressive and the cooing background vocals of the chorus make the lyrics, "When light will you come here," all the more haunting and beautiful. The ghostly chorus appears louder over military drums on the next track, "Feared and Known." The seventeen guest musicians that appear throughout add much depth and spontaneity to Crespo's powerful folk-influenced compositions.' -Jake Rose -West Coast Performer Magazine (Album review for 'like this forever') __________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________ Though Eric Crespo is, as he says, the one constant in Ghost to Falco, he's webbed in quite a cast these past few years, including Nick Delffs of Shaky Hands and Mike McKinnon of Wet Confetti. Not surprisingly, GTF's sound is just as expansive as it's collection of band members. Expect a night of noisy art rock, clatters of nu jazz, and tangents into trancy and symphonically stormy experiments, all wrapped around grounded but ghostly whispers that catch Crespo in moments of peace and bitterness.-ANIKA SABIN --The Willamette Week __________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________ Portland's Ghost to Falco incorporates some lo-fi electronics into his unpredictable mix of post-folk and loopy experimentalism. -The Seattle Stranger.
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    Black Knight
    Six years ago, I had the idea that a few 19th century composers might have set a few poems by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to music. If that music existed, I had hoped to create a choral concert in commemoration of the 200th birthday of our Portland-born poet. In it's third season, 2009, after performing and recording nearly 100 musical settings of Longfellow texts -- among them an astounding 32 world premieres of the winning entries in our annual Longfellow Chorus International Composers Competition -- The Longfellow Chorus stood before what seemed to be a potentially boundless repertory of Longfellow vocal music, new and old. There are hundreds of period songs yet to be sung and recorded, and a number of very good period cantatas. Beyond these older settings, numerous new Longfellow songs, choruses and cantatas were -- and still are -- being created for The Longfellow Chorus International Composers Competition by composers from around the world -- Australia and New Zealand, Asia, Europe, North and South America -- and these are adding a fresh, modern perspective. More than 200 composers have answered our call. The music contained in this CD set is from our third annual Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Birthday Choral Concert, which took place on February 28 and March 1, 2009, just after Longfellow's 202nd birthday. Published in 1845, The Day is Done is a fairly early poem. Longfellow was experiencing family life as a young father, and it is easy to imagine that the person "lending the beauty of" her "voice" to the "rhyme of the poet" was young mother Frances Appleton Longfellow, 1817-1861. George Whitefield Chadwick, 1854-1931, set Longfellow's Allah translation to music in 1887. At the time, he was a freelance composer in Boston and a church organist known for a certain Bohemian streak. Marienne Kreitlow has adeptly captured the dramatic mood of The Challenge -- a poem first published in Longfellow's 1873 Birds of Passage, Flight the Third -- in her setting for baritone voice. No less than in his early works, Longfellow shows in his later works an awareness that certain poems would inevitably be set to music by someone, somewhere, at some time. The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls was published near the end of Longfellow's life in Ultima Thule, 1880, and is included under the subtitle Folk-Songs. John Knowles Paine, 1839-1906, is Portland's other Victorian-American superstar. He grew up on Oxford Street. His father, Jacob, ran the local Chickering piano dealership where, in 1843, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow bought a piano as a wedding present for "Fanny" Appleton. It Is Not Always May -- text from Longfellow's Ballads and Other Poems, 1842 -- is based on a Spanish proverb, no hay pájaros en los nidos de antaño: "there are no birds in last year's nest." You can't see the beautiful, light snowflakes that were falling in South Portland on March 1, 2009, as The Longfellow Chorus performed Pontet's and Hopson's versions of Snow-Flakes, but if you listen carefully, you might hear them. About his humorous setting for bass-baritone voice and piano, composer Riccardo La Spina comments: "'Prescrizione'...evokes the style of comic operatic aria for bass of Longfellow's time, with a nod to Mozart's Don Giovanni..., one of the poet's favorite operas." Christmas Bells was Longfellow's response to the outbreak of the American Civil War, and over the past 147 years, numerous composers have turned to it as a source for musical expression of outrage and hope during the onset of newer wars. In 1916, John S. Matthews, 1870-1934, used the poem as the basis for his musical response to the First World War. Kevin Jones's contribution expresses his response to the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. Charles Ives's impressionistic, truncated version of The Children's Hour is paired with the atonal setting of Autumn Within by Traci Mendel. With his setting of Nature, Stanley Hoffman remembers his father, Josef, and, as the father of a four-year-old daughter, reflects on his own experience as a parent. The mother of Edward Elgar didn't believe that her son understood women enough to be able to attract a young bride, so she made him read Longfellow's novel Hyperion for inspiration. The result was a strange, rarely-performed cantata called The Black Knight, something that leaves the musical impression of being a late-Victorian precursor of Star Wars. - -Charles Kaufmann, Artistic Director of The Longfellow Chorus.
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