Ruth Garbus Trio and Bernice. With minimalist avant-pop songs that embrace the impermanence of all things, Ruth Garbus will be joined by Elie McAfee-Hahn and Nick Bisceglia for an ephemeral night of magic. Aglow with affection, curiosity, and communion, Toronto-based Bernice gracefully expands into new territories of R&B and neo-soul.
Ruth Garbus Trio and Bernice will perform at Epsilon Spires in Brattleboro on April 15th. Doors open at 7:45 p.m., and music begins shortly after 8 p.m. Tickets can be purchased at https://www.epsilonspires.org/event-info/ruth-garbus-trio-bernice.
Ruth Garbus is a resident of Brattleboro, VT. Other current projects include Earth Flower and Gloyd. Garbus’s prior solo recordings – 2019’s Kleinmeister LP, 2010’s Rendezvous with Rama LP, and the EP Ruthie’s Requests, Joule EP, and Hello Everybody – have been released on Burger Records, Autumn Records, Feeding Tube Records, and OSR Tapes. In addition to her solo performances, she improvises vocally with an experimental quintet featuring Wendy Eisenberg, Donny Shaw, Neil Young, and Andy Allen. She was previously in the bands Happy Birthday and Feathers.
Songs are awake when you sing them. Electricity flows between the performer and the performee on Ruth Garbus’ recent album Alive People. It feels and vibrates in front of a velvet curtain and to the back of the club. Electricity flows through the board, the amps, and the mics. The whole room is a body of different kinds of waves that become one thing. To capture that, and then take those clean tapes – direct – and get them mixed by Justin Pizzoferrato like they were printed in a soundproof recording cave…that creates the potential for magic—a glittering, frontal, activated, sumptuous play emerging from the wave of a misty sparkler.
Ruth Garbus’s Alive People is a studio album full of underground anthems for sensitive people of all ages that happened to be recorded in a club with an audience of a hundred. Interstitial improvisations that occurred on stage during the performance are between the compositions. These are not presented in sequence. It’s not a lesser copy of a moving experience. It’s an echoing recreation, traveling out photons bent through and into a pastel rainbow.
Collaborators joined Ruth on stage at different points: Elie Mcafee-Hahn on synth and bass, Julie Bodian on atypical guitars, and Julia Tadlock on voice and presence. Nick Bisceglia engineered, with Ruth’s two vocal mics taped together, the room split to its mid and sides, the pop filter a matte circle in front of the shimmering curtain. Raising the wand and looking up, you see an evergreen on one side, a childhood bedroom on the other, and Alive People in between.
Canada’s beloved experimental pop group BERNICE (Toronto) is the project of musician and songwriter Robin Dann (voice, songs) and her longtime collaborators Thom Gill (keyboards), Philippe Melanson (percussion), Daniel Fortin (bass), and Felicity Willians (voice). For over a decade, the band has made music that wanders into R&B, neo-soul, and free music and coalesces through Robin’s desire to commune with audiences through song and lyrics. Telephone Explosion Records released Cruisin’ in April 2023 and has released four full-length albums and an EP, two of which were nominated for Canada’s Polaris Prize. Bernice’s music gracefully drifts between genres. Some say new fusion, others say alt-pop, and others still scratch their heads but dig it.
“Bernice’s Eau De Bonjourno sounds like someone dropped a beautiful crystal, and rather than breaking into violent shards, it drifted off as glistening bubbles” -Stereogum.
“Eau De Bonjourno is unusually mesmerizing with its movements, connected by the natural spirit of chaos” -Pitchfork.
“I go back to Ruth’s music over and over again. She has the best, weirdest chord changes, the catchiest and most exotic melodies and lyrics, distilled over what I imagine to be many months and years. To me her songs reaffirm the power of music itself and its basic elements – big and small intervals placed just so in time, the play of sound and meaning in words, parts put together without force or artifice. Ruth is one of my favorite singer-songwriters ever”. – Chris Cohen
Do not miss Ruth Garbus Trio and Bernice!
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