Tuesday, December 20, 2016

“GENIUS” (NOISEY) LELAND SUNDRIES SIGNS PUBLISHING AGREEMENT WITH MOTHER WEST MUSIC

Indie/Americana/garage band Leland Sundries, which made a splash this year with its full-length debut ‘music for outcasts,’ has signed a publishing deal with fellow Brooklynites Mother West Music. Leland Sundries’ ‘music for outcasts’ (L'Echiquier/Decor/Weiner Records) earned numerous spotlights as well as airplay from KEXP, WFUV, WFMU, and beyond:

“A-… genius.”
- Robert Christgau, NOISEY, July 22, 2016. Full review: https://noisey.vice.com/en_us/article/robert-christgau-expert-witness-leland-sundries

“Heaps of wit and melody… Beautiful rambling storytelling that flirts with pop and sounds a little like Silver Jews.”
- Peter Watts, UNCUT, April, 2016

“Scrappy yet ingenuous rock poetry.”
- MOJO, March, 2016

“Loss-Eaton and company avoid predictability… upturned middle finger that resides at the center of their sound. Ultimately ‘Music for Outcasts’ finds truth in its title… Those prone to coloring outside the lines will have cause to give a decided nod of approval.”
- Lee Zimmerman, Relix, October/November issue

"One of the more exciting roots-based bands to be unleashed in quite a while... This fellow knows his geography now. Both out in the rolling hills and inside his own heart and soul... One minute Leland Sundries has you weeping in your beer over the cowboy lament, 'Keys in The Boot,' the next they’re rocking as righteously as The New York Dolls-inspired 'Bad Hair Day.' Throw in the radiant Power Pop of 'Apocalypse Love Song,' and you’ll see there isn’t a genre they haven’t mastered. These guys have only one rule about the music they play: it has to sound authentic and cool. Which, a good damn portion of the time, it does."
- Peter Gerstenzang, American Songwriter, May 6, 2016

“Awesomeness.”
- Justin Cober-Lake, Pop Matters, June 2, 2016

“Fine character-building.”
- Eric Davidson, CMJ, April 18, 2016

"A killer record... The record has devoured my subconscious... creative wordplay... Witty and left of center, juxtapose from the norm, some fresh and fun genre-bending rock-n-roll...Loss-Eaton is a songwriter’s songwriter, languid stories and never short on style... A tried and true summer soundtrack for yours truly, simply a record you can’t grow not fond of. Each track a small ride to a cool destination."
-Scott Zuppardo, No Depression, August 9, 2016

“Superb.”
- Sjimon Gompers, Impose, March 11, 2016

“We were instantly hooked. In fact, we're so impressed by the Brooklyn-natives to the point where we can't begin to effusively begin to heap enough praise.”
- Pure Volume, June 1, 2016

“Life affirming… Leland Sundries’ debut album and first European release shows a ton of promise and is a very enjoyable listen.  It will certainly appeal to fans of bands like Velvet Underground and Jonathan Richman as well as fans of bands like Whiskeytown and Starsailor.”
- Alan Ewart, Louder Than War (UK), February 16, 2016

“Leland Sundries match crackling garage rock with a near bubblegum love of melody. The band's sound sits somewhere between Pavement and The Archies, with a dose of Jonathan Richman's off kilter wit thrown in for good measure.”
- Robin Murray, Clash Music (UK), January 19, 2016

Brooklyn-based Mother West has grown from a small indie label and recording studio to a full-service boutique music catalog, offering music licensing for film and television, publicity and promotions, customized distribution, online sales, music production and artist management. With an impressive roster under it's belt, Mother West continues to work with an array of artists in various capacities, including Motopony, Mother Feather, The Magnetic Fields, Aloud, The Bones of J.R Jones, Peppina, Kris Gruen, Cold Blood Club and many others.

Originally founded by musicians Charles Newman and Paul Casanova, Mother West was named after the sign on the deli downstairs from their studio and was created to release their debut record Noreally Thanks from their band PLEASE in 1994. This led to a cut on the platinum selling Empire Records Soundtrack on A&M Records and the company's first foray into placing music into films.  Since then, and under the helm of Newman, the company continues to grow it's catalog and develop it's community of artists.

2016 marks a new partnership with Los Angeles-based publisher Defend Music, who will be representing the publishing interest of the Mother West catalog in North America, with Kobalt Publishing representing the catalog globally.

Friday, December 16, 2016

Peter Mulvey bio

Over the past 20 years, Mulvey has pursued a restless, eclectic path as a writer and musician – immersing himself in Tin PanAlley jazz, modern acoustic, poetry, narrative, and Americana stylings. Relentlessly touring as a headliner – his attitude is, “When you love what you do, you can work all the time,” – he has also shared the stage with luminaries such as Emmylou Harris, Richard Thompson, Ani diFranco, Indigo Girls, and Greg Brown, and has attracted an audience that stretches from Anchorage to Amsterdam.

Peter Mulvey began as a self-described “city kid” from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He played, wrote, and sang in bands while studying theatre there, and then traveled to Dublin, Ireland, in 1989, where he learned the trade of the street singer. Returning to the States, he relocated to Boston with two self-released CDs in hand: Brother Rabbit Speaks (1992) and Rain (1994). In Boston he took to playing in the subways as a full-time occupation. The seven hour sessions playing to passers-by and commuters not only strengthened his accomplished guitar playing but also sharpened his innate gifts as a communicator. In a few short years he had made the transition to touring songwriter. He signed with indie upstart Eastern Front Records, released Rapture (1995) and Deep Blue (1997), and threw himself into a life on the road. He quickly released Glencree (1998), a recorded live in Ireland.

The road years further seasoned his abilities as a performer. Whether playing solo or with a band in tow, Mulvey has a rare ability to hold an audience’s attention and transport them, using wit, humor, and a subtle but sophisticated melodic and harmonic sensibility to gracefully introduce complex and provocative concepts and characters.

Having since resettled back in Milwaukee, Peter has continued his touring life while making seven solo records with Signature Sounds, the venerable singer/songwriter label in western Massachusetts’ fertile musical Pioneer Valley. His sixth release, The Trouble With Poets (2000), features the title track which remains among his best-known songs. 2002 brought Ten Thousand Mornings, a CD of cover songs recorded live on Boston’s Davis Square subway platform. The name refers to the collective number of commuters’ mornings Peter hoped he was entertaining, or touching, in some way. His albums have always maintained the spontaneity and edge of his live performances, including his 2004 Kitchen Radio and 2006 CD, The Knuckleball Suite, both of which were recorded in just a few days with a band of sympathetic co-conspirators. He followed the ensemble vibe of these records with Notes from Elsewhere (2007), which consists of solo acoustic recordings of some of his most popular songs.

Collaboration is another source for Peter’s continued growth. In 2003, he released the trio album, Redbird, with fellow songwriters Kris Delmhorst and Jeffrey Foucault. The album’s 17 songs range from jazz standards to old country tunes to contemporary covers, all recorded in three days around one microphone. Peter’s annual hometown holiday in-the-round gigs have become an institution over nearly a decade. He can sit in with nearly any musician or ensemble and improvise in the common language of music.

As a complement to his touring and recording, Peter has also kept a hand in education; teaching guitar and songwriting workshops across the country. His songs and deep baritone voice have been heard in documentary films, major television shows, and by dance and theater companies. In 2004 Peter released a full-length DVD, On the Way, featuring interview and concert footage.

For the past several years Peter has done an annual Fall tour entirely by bicycle, partly for environmental reasons and partly for the sheer fun of continuing his creative, unorthodox approach to a long and fruitful career as an artist.

In every aspect of his career, Mulvey draws on an extremely broad swath of influence; he is always reading, listening, and eager to hear new poetry, modern minimalist composers, old-time fiddle tunes, Argentinean trip-hop, or top-shelf bar bands. Said The Irish Times: “Peter Mulvey is consistently the most original and dynamic of the US singer-songwriters to tour these shores. A phenomenal performer with huge energy, a quick fire, quirky take on life, and an extraordinary guitar style. A joy to see.”

Still, it is the live performance that defines that work. Night after night, whether performing solo, duo (with David “Goody” Goodrich), or sometimes even with a band, Mulvey attempts to be the sum of his parts, to draw on all the musical legacies he has studied, to make a fresh, vital moment out of everything he and the audience have brought to the table that night. “People need this. I need this. To come together in a room, to try to make music come alive, for real, for right now, and then to let it go…that is the whole deal for me."
for me.”

Wednesday, December 7, 2016

Suitcase Junket publicity photos

Credit for all: Joanna Chattman, click for high res








Suitcase Junket bio

Long bio:

Matt Lorenz sits alone on a suitcase in the center of a complex construction of upcycled cookpots, saw blades and broken chairs. Artist, tinkerer, tunesmith, swamp yankee. A one-man salvage specialist singing into the hollow of a Dumpster guitar, slipping a broken bottleneck onto the slide finger, railing on a box of twisted forks and bones, rocking till every sound is ragged at its edges, till the house is singing back. Then, unplugging all the amps and letting one mountain ballad soar over the raw strings on that guitar. Every night is a hard-driving, blues-grinding, throat-singing search-and-rescue junket. Sooner or later everything rusts, busts, and gets tossed into the junk heap: iron, bones, leather, hot rods, muskrats, thenight, the heart. The goal is to recover it. To waste nothing. To create new ways from old. This is The Suitcase Junket.
 
Matt Lorenz was raised in Cavendish, Vermont, the son of teachers. He learned to sing by copying his sister Kate. (The siblings are two-thirds of the touring trio Rusty Belle.) Lorenz graduated from Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 2004, having taught himself to throat-sing thanks to a South Indian cooking class. On moving day, he pulled his guitar, filled with mold and worse for wear, from a dorm Dumpster. He fixed it up and started pulling songs out of it. That was the beginning.   
The Suitcase Junket is filling rooms and drawing festival crowds all over his native New England and beyond, from Signal Kitchen near the Canadian border to Wisconsin's Mile of Music Festival, from Ireland's pubs to Mountain Jam in the Catskills, from opening nights for Lake Street Dive and Charlie Musselwhite to Mountain Stage in West Virginia. He caught the attention of National Public Radio who chose his video session for "Earth Apple" from his 2015 album Make Time as one of the year's favorite sessions.

On the heels of the widely acclaimed 2015 LP Make Time, Matt Lorenz is releasing an E.P. entitled Dying Star, on Signature Sounds, whose roster includes Lake Street Dive, And the Kids, Eilen Jewell, Chris Smither, Winterpills, Parsonsfield, Barnstar! and alumni Crooked Still, Josh Ritter, Erin McKeown, and Lori McKenna. With Dying Star, The Suitcase Junket is poised to make the jump from one of New England's best kept roots star secrets, to a household name. As one critic aptly summed up, "The Suitcase Junket is a lo-fi, low-tuned, low-down blast of end-times folk blues. It's crude; it's magnificent.... one man band leader Matt Lorenz  incants and intones like a cross between Hound Dog Taylor and a Tuvan throat singer who has swallowed a bird. Take the singer-songwriter idiom, give it a low grade fever and a guitar and this is what you get. Captivating, mesmerizing, and gone ... real gone" (The Rochester Times).

Short bio:

The Suitcase Junket is deep-groove blues, low-fi hard-driving rock, killer sweet ballads rising over wreckage. It's big music, informed by what used to be played on back porches and mountains -- right at home in rock halls. Here's the thing: You've got to see it to believe it. All that mighty sound is coming from one guy -- Matt Lorenz -- sitting there, skinny and big hair, on an old leather satchel in the center of a pile of instruments he built of salvage: rigged-up pots, glass, bones, a box of forks, a beat-up toy keyboard, a pair of ancient amps, a dumpster guitar. The haunting, invented sound of throat singing. Key to the operation is get-gone  songwriting and a single, glorious, ragged, road-worn, powerhouse voice. The Suitcase Junket didn't set out to be a one-man band but it had to happen that way. Yankee thrift. Songs from a new, old place.