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Eric Chenaux is a Canadian guitarist, songwriter, singer and sound sculptor. He has released seven solo albums of experimental song on the Montréal-based imprint Constellation, charting an adventurous and uncompromising path through avant-folk, out-jazz and pop composition, increasingly rooted in a unique and elemental juxtaposition of fried, frazzled, semi-improvised guitar and smooth, clear tenor balladry. He has been called “a musician like no other” by Tiny Mix Tapes; his solo albums praised by The Quietus as “stunningly beautiful, genuinely inimitable, whose reputation will only grow with time.” Gracing the cover of The Wire magazine in 2017, the feature article declared: “Chenaux succeeds in generating an astonishing array of timbres. A singer and songwriter possessed of angelic sweetness and clarity accompanying himself with largely improvised, visceral guitar textures that seem intent on undermining and obscuring his own songs. It’s the need to communicate tussling with the urge to obfuscate; lucidity versus opacity; form against chaos.”
He has performed and recorded with countless artists, including Ryan Driver, Sandro Perri, Eloïse Decazes, Michelle McAdorey, Nick Fraser, Martin Arnold, Radwan Ghazi Moumneh, Pauline Oliveros, John Oswald, Michael Snow, Brodie West, Han Bennink, Christine Abdelnour, Michael Moore, Josephine Foster, Martin Tetrault, Wilbert De Joode, Gareth Davis, Jacob Wren, Norberto Lobo, Nathaniel Mann and many more.
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Topeka is David Birchall, Flynn Mchardy and Arthur Bickers’ rock band, a rock band trapped inside a freely improvising guitar trio’s body. The trio embraces tension between idiom and abstraction. They glide between manipulating their instruments to find obtuse textures and embodying the spirit of a post rock jam band, searching for grooves and wide-open spaces. The music unfurls gradually, bridging from one idea to the next, growing slowly and dying away naturally. Something in it is reminiscent of an expansive landscape, hence the name Topeka, which calls forth imagery of America’s rugged Midwest.
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Askasong: "Ancient redundant electronics found and some made, two voices rise the melody tide up through microphones, occasional loops of many travels and many conversations - just funny and angry about stuff. Leeds to Manchester direct connection - two women and a bossy child."