The Bowery Presents

The Mercury Lounge upcoming shows

Late Show

Basia Bulat
10:30
The Acorn
9:30

Venue:
The Mercury Lounge
Date:
Thu 9/23
Notes:
21+
Doors: 9:30 PM / Show: 9:30 PM
$12
Tickets
Basia Bulat
official website
myspace
"I don't think I realised the radio had more than one station til I was 11 or 12," Basia Bulat says. At the family home in Toronto, the dial was always fixed to the local oldies station: Motown, Stax, The Beatles, Beach Boys and Sam Cooke. While her mother hunted for someone to do the dishes, Basia and her younger brother Bobby would hide with a radio or tape player, happily rattled by all that song.

Since the age of three, Basia has been sitting on piano stools and trying to hammer things out. It started with her piano-teacher mum, but along the way Basia's picked up guitar, autoharp, banjo, ukelele, sax and flute. In high-school her instrument was the upright bass a lone girl among "eight-foot-tall guys, goofing off with the tubas". There's a sense of play that still suffuses her music, jostling under the songs of regret and love, want and joy. When her brother began in his teens to play drums with punk bands, Basia would be there with her demerara voice, joining happily in the jam. When she left for university in London, Ontario, musicians began to drop by her downtown apartment. Many nights were spent with these classically-trained friends, laughing and singing, and together they made a glad, bright noise.

For the summer of 2006, Basia went to live in Montreal. Through friends she met Howard Bilerman, an engineer and co-owner of the famed Hotel 2 Tango studio. Basia cashed some student loans to record with Bilerman in one of the final sessions at the original H2T site, but by the third day she had lost her voice. It was ultimately these rough early takes, hoarse with excitement, that formed the bulk of Oh My Darling. Initially the recordings were meant only as an "audible memory" of the time Basia spent with friends in London and Montreal: "We liked playing together so much, and I just wanted to remember that." But Bilerman was smitten with the songs, with Basia and her band, and he began to write to friends at labels, friends with music-blogs, anyone who might pay attention. For despite the original intention, these tracks are breathless, thirsty, dislodged from dreary nostalgia. There are strings, yes, and acoustic guitar, but also a frantic drum-kit gallop; the influence of the spirits of wild Jeff Magnum, big-voiced Odetta, Emily Dickinson and all those boisterous soul-music singles. It's this spark that sets Basia Bulat apart from the raft of typical singer-songwriters, and also what attracted the interest of Geoff Travis and Britain's legendary Rough Trade label who released Oh My Darling in Europe and Japan in the spring of 2007.

Since then Basia and her band have toured central Canada and Europe, sharing stages with the likes of the Great Lake Swimmers, Julie Doiron, Sondre Lerche, and The Veils, leaving a trail of new fans and happy critics along the way. In mid-2007 a Canadian deal was inked with Hayden's Hardwood Records, preceding a Western Canada tour with Final Fantasy this fall. Oh, My Darling is a pet project no longer, but Basia's ambitions are unchanged from those early days of that tiny apartment: "I love songs that I can sing along to," Basia says, and then she corrects herself, balling her hand into a fist. "No, songs that you want to sing along to."

by Sean Michaels
The Acorn
official website
myspace
Ottawa used to be a lumber town. For some reason, it got chosen as Canada's capital. Beneath the federal veneer, its rural origins linger, drenched in woodsmoke, bar-brawls and glinting saw blades. Two hours down river from Montreal, the woods get a little thicker and the air a little cleaner. It's a place where the city lights merge with constellations, and where The Acorn was born.

A disciple of folk with a strong penchant for experimental pop music, Rolf Klausener started writing under The Acorn moniker in the summer of 2002. Initially an excuse to teach himself home-recording, these furtive experiments would eventually become The Acorn's first full-length release, a mellifluous, electro-acoustic tribute to the Ottawa region, The Pink Ghosts.

Inspired by the road and the communities they discovered beyond their bucolic capital city, The Acorn made every effort to travel the country, touring independently and as often as they could. Throughout 2005, they forged ties with a new, burgeoning independent Canadian music scene which grew to include Ohbijou, Bell Orchestre, Timber Timbre, Great Lake Swimmers, Snailhouse and many more.

After several independent releases, the band was signed to Toronto's indie stronghold, Paper Bag Records. In 2007 and after months of interviews and ethno-musicological research, the band created its most ambitious and widely-acclaimed record to date, Glory Hope Mountain.

Not quite biography nor musical folk tale, Glory Hope Mountain, recounts the early life of Klausener's Central-American-born mother. The album's song-stories harbour the triumphs, sorrow and adventures of a remarkable life. Armed with Garifuna-inspired rhythms, gut-strings, ukuleles, marimbas and the collective's best songwriting to date, The Acorn created a stirring musical document&183;

Since the release of Glory Hope Mountain, The Acorn have toured Europe and North America extensively and accrued a cord of critical love for both their live show and their recorded output. They've graced the cover of Canada's National music magazine, Exclaim and were nominated for the 2008 Polaris Award.

In the summer of 2009, the Acorn retreated from two years on the road to an isolated cottage in Northern Quebec to begin work on their third full-length album, No Ghost. Songs took shape at all hours, crafted from hazy late-night improvisations, early morning melodies pulled from the thinning threads of sleep. Modernity clashed with the bucolic via exploratory percussion, feedback, acoustic textures and the natural surrounding sounds. The band then traded trees for telephone poles to finish recording in a sweltering heatwave at Montreal's Treatment Room Studios (Plants & Animals, Angela Desveaux). There, the breezy ease of rural surrounds was buried under sweat-caked skin and cracked asphalt, birdsong drowned out by thick air and engine hum. Set for a June 2010 release, No Ghost is a recording swaddled in dichotomy: togetherness and isolation, acoustic and electric, destruction and restoration.
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