Eliza Niemi
Our earliest exposures to music can often be the most formative. For Toronto-based songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Eliza Niemi, that influence came from her Dad who taught her the basics of bass and guitar at home. These childhood experiences of playing music together by ear fostered the sense of playfulness that she’s approached her craft with ever since. They also instilled an ethic in her creative work that prioritizes making music with friends and loved ones. Those honed guitar —and later piano, cello and vocal— skills make Eliza an ideal collaborator: starting in Halifax’s rich music scene with the mid-2010s experimental pop groups New Love Underground and Mauno, and later in her role supporting artists Le Ren, Poolblood and Evan J. Cartwright. Connection and collaboration lives in the intimacy of her music— there's an open, inviting quality to her softly sung and affable lyrics that unfold like a conversation with a good friend. Her latest album, Staying Mellow Blows, furthers these ideas and aesthetics to a staggering degree, retaining the candor, humor and emotional humility she’s known for, while letting the vast number of supporting musicians shape each song with their own emotionally resonant performances. The result feels whimsical and inspired, and is the sound of an artist flourishing.
https://elizaniemi.bandcamp.com/
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Upstate NY based band Blue Ranger are here to remind us that there are small moments of magic in the everyday. Formed in 2015, the trio have been crafting soft-focused folk that celebrates the beauty in our uncertainties with an existential flair. Following their 2018 LP Saving A Beauty (Five Kill Records) comes a fresh single - True Blue - where candid, autobiographical tales dance among a wealth of imaginary characters. The trio brings their propulsive folk influenced sound to improvisatory heights in live settings - the product of countless years moving sound.
https://blueranger.bandcamp.com
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Ongoing
Ongoing is a project lead by local musician Katie Jones, joined by Adam Netsky on drums, multi-instrumentalist Braden Bodensteiner and Jon Hudack on bass. The name comes from Donna Haraway’s concept of ongoingness, and the necessity of storytelling in a compost society- a concept that fuels Jones’ writing. The group’s musical stylings tend to be subconsciously influenced by early Fairport Convention, Wilco, Dino Valenti and the pure vocal conviction of Linda Ronstadt. Ongoing’s psychedelic folk tunes come to life as if conjuring the feverish excitement of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s journal entry:
“What if you slept / And what if / In your sleep / You dreamed / And what if / In your dream / You went to heaven / And there plucked a strange and beautiful flower /And what if / When you awoke / You had that flower in you hand / Ah, what then?”