Wrekmeister Harmonies’ music is as expansive as it is deeply personal. Comprised of a revolving cast of musicians around enigmatic constants JR Robinson and Esther Shaw, collaboration has always been a cornerstone of the group’s creative process. While early albums were written for large ensembles and to be performed in grandiose public spaces, more recent recordings peeled back the layers of orchestral bombast to focus in on the raw emotion at their heart of their compositions. We Love to Look at the Carnage, the group’s latest outing represents some of their most subtle and powerful work to date. The album sees the core duo of guitarist/vocalist Robinson and multi-instrumentalist Shaw augmented with longtime friend and collaborator Thor Harris (Swans) on percussion and for the first time Jamie Stewart (Xiu Xiu) on electronics, introducing surprising new sonics into Wrekmeister Harmonies’ minimalist arrangements without sacrificing their intense intimacy.
https://wrekmeisterharmonies.bandcamp.com ----------------------- After years spent performing and recording with other artists and groups, Canadian-born, New York City-based Julia Kent found her own voice with her solo debut, Delay, an exploration of the private emotional worlds that exist within the disjunctions and disorientations of travel, hailed for its “lovely, melancholy” compositions, full of “aching romanticism…rich melodicism, and detailed arrangements.” She toured to support it throughout Europe and North America, and subsequently released an EP, Last Day in July.
In Green and Grey, her following solo record, she continued to use looped and layered cello, electronics, and field recordings to explore the intersections between the human world and the natural world, the melding of the technological and the organic, the patterns and repetitions that exist in nature and are mirrored in human creations, and the complexity and fragility of our relationships with one another and with the world that surrounds us.
She moved to the Leaf Label to release Character in2013 and Asperities in 2015.
Her most recent record, Temporal, came out in January 2019. Made up mostly of music originally created to accompany dance and theatre, it is a meditation on the passing of time and the fragility of existence.
In addition to her solo albums, Julia Kent has composed a number of original film scores, as well as music for theatre and dance performances. She has toured throughout Europe and North America, including appearances at Primavera Sound in Barcelona, the Donau festival in Austria, Meltdown in London, the Unsound festival in New York City, Reeperbahn in Hamburg, CTM in Berlin, and Mutek in Montreal.
