OK EVERYONE. THIS IS THE
SHOW YOU HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR!! Back for their second show and CD
RELEASE PARTY. WELCOME BULL KELP!! Call 819 459 8883 or email Jeffrey @ spillytalker@gmail.com to reserve tickets or a seat for dinner prior to show.
Bull Kelp began when
songwriters Taylor Ashton and Zoe Guigueno had six weeks to kill in
Winnipeg in the fall of 2011. They had played together for 2 years in
the five-piece alt-folk band Fish & Bird, and when Guigueno
announced her departure from that band, the two devised Bull Kelp as a
way to continue making music together, and to arrange new songs that
didn’t seem to fit in their other projects.
After each spending a lot of time in larger bands, the two decided
to explore the limitations of the duo format, and to each contribute
roughly half of the songs. They set out to create an engaging
repertoire with only Guigueno’s upright bass, Ashton’s guitar (and
sometimes banjo), and their two voices – pushing each element into new
and different roles from song to song. The two trade lead &
harmony vocals between songs and paint a simple but intricate
instrumental landscape with parts that seamlessly swap around rhythmic,
melodic, and harmonic duties.
For their debut
album, Painting & Drawing - out March 15th on Fiddle Head Records -
they took lyrical inspiration from novels, movies, traditional folk
songs, science podcasts, and the magic of everyday life. What they
ended up with was an album’s worth of songs about love, birth, death,
coffee, chess, and other things that happened to be on their minds.
Diverse in its subject matter and arrangements, on a whole the album has
a cohesion that is more Lynchian than literal. The album addresses
universal themes like watching your childhood friends start families
(Grown Ups) and the bittersweetness of parting (I Ain't Givin' Up On
You), along with more surreal scenes like laying underneath a piano in a
house that is melting around you (Matryoshka). It paints an
impressionistic picture of what it is to be young, trying to sort out
your life amongst growing access to information and shrinking certainty
about the future, while we paradoxically become more connected and more
alienated by technology.
Originally conceiving
Painting & Drawing as a potential band name, the two realized it
made a great name for an album. One day in March, the two posed with
their instruments at the Toronto School of Art for a drop-in painting
class, and all the artists generously agreed to let their pieces be used
for the album’s artwork. Each gorgeous piece depicts Taylor Ashton
& Zoe Guigueno in a different style and medium, from a different
angle. As a collection, the paintings & drawings give you a sense
of the duo that a single portrait never could. This reflects the way
that the songs on the album show you different angles of their
particular slice of the human condition, adding up to a nuanced,
impressionistic whole.
The album was recorded in
a tiny Montreal apartment by Manitoba’s Darwin Baker (of the Crooked
Brothers – with whom Guigueno toured extensively in Europe) and mixed by
BC’s Adam Iredale-Gray (Ashton’s co-bandleader in Fish & Bird) – a
true community effort. While the duo are mainly kept busy by their main
projects – Ashton with Fish & Bird, and Guigueno having recently
been recruited by in the Boston-based progressive stringband Joy Kills
Sorrow – Painting & Drawing captures a point in time they are proud
to share with the world, and they’re excited to fit in live appearances
whenever possible.
www.bullkelp.bandcamp.com
www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvu48Md6Fso
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yw5x_0A4Wd0
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