Sober Psychedelic / Nature Dad

Contact/booking:
loudsun777@gmail.com 

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This is a collection of music I've been developing for the past few years. Lo-fi shoegazey stuff

I walk around. I eat pie. I make things. I sing songs. Maybe, one day, I'll get around to recording those songs...or at least, recording them at better quality.

Asthmatic Kitty Records is an independent record label that was co-founded by Lowell Brams and his stepson, singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens, in 1999. Since its founding, AKR has released albums by a variety of artists, including Lily & Madeleine, My Brightest Diamond and Helado Negro, and is currently home to Sufjan Stevens, Angelo De Augustine, Denison Witmer and The Welcome Wagon. 

Asthmatic Kitty was named after Sara, an orange and white tabby who wandered out of the woods pregnant and starving near Holland, Michigan in 1994. For fourteen years she brought joy as a beloved friend to Lowell, enjoying a happy life despite her initial hardships. Her asthma improved after moving west to New Mexico and Wyoming, where she lived out her days as an asthmatic kitty in name only.

Archives from 2023 and earlier. New material forthcoming.

Cate Le Bon is an artist hailing from Carmarthenshire, rural West Wales. Be it on her more minimalist, acoustic-leaning 2009 debut album Me Oh My or critically acclaimed, liquid-riffed 2013 LP Mug Museum as well as 2016s Crab Day and the Mercury Award nominated Reward, Cate Le Bon’s solo work — and indeed also her production work, such as that carried out on the recent John Grant album, Boy From Michigan, or  Deerhunter's Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?  (4AD, January 2019) — has always resisted pigeonholing, walking the tightrope between krautrock aloofness and heartbreaking tenderness; deadpan served with a twinkle in the eye, a flick of the fringe and a lick of the Telecaster.

New album Pompeii bears a storied title summoning apocalypse, but the metaphor eclipses any “dissection of immediacy,” says Le Bon. Sonically minimal in parts, its lyrics jog between self-reflection and direct address. Written primarily on bass and composed entirely alone in an “uninterrupted vacuum,” Le Bon plays every instrument (except drums and saxophones) and recorded the album largely by herself with long-term collaborator and co-producer Samur Khouja in Cardiff, Wales.

The songs of Pompeii feel suspended in time, both of the moment and instant but reactionary and Dada-esque in their insistence to be playful, satirical, and surreal. From the spirited, strutting bass fretwork of “Moderation”, to the sax-swagger of “Running Away”; a tale exquisite in nature but ultimately doomed (The fountain that empties the world / Too beautiful to hold), escapism lives as a foil to the outside world. Pompeii’s audacious tribute to memory, compassion, and mortal salience is here to stay.

a girl & her guitar. all tracks recorded on garageband in my living room.

CRAMP BARK is following