Salvador Dali, Charles Bukowski, Nick Cave, Peter Murphy and Hieronymus Bosch are just some of the influences. Making strangewave music. Random tones and bells. Where's your will to be weird?

The instrumental post-rock ambience of Unwed Sailor has been guided by the vision of Johnathon Ford since its inception in 1998. He formed Unwed Sailor in Seattle and has since been based in other cities including Chicago, Tulsa, and New Orleans.
Ford has leapt in a myriad of instrumental directions, from angular post-rock rhythms, to dreamy shoegaze soundscapes, to ambient folk. Through these directions, all of Unwed Sailor’s albums share a certain melodic sensibility, a flavor that’s undeniably Ford’s, yet each its own unique place in creating the sound and vision of Unwed Sailor.

“A late-night drive to nowhere, built on journeying melodies and throttling atmosphere. Unwed Sailor’s shoegazing, new wave escapism is very deeply felt right now” NPR Music

“Unwed Sailor’s beloved album “Mute the Charm” is post-rock with an unwavering pulse, tightly wound connective tissue, and self-proclaimed shades of everything from The Stone Roses to Seam.” 
Bandcamp (Album of the Day)

“(Unwed Sailor’s) “Truth or Consequences” is poignant and poised, intimate but ambitious in its pursuit of connection.”
Under the Radar

“For more than two decades, Ford has led the post-rock band Unwed Sailor. In that time, Ford has steered the band through a searching string of albums, incorporating the influence of ambient music, shoegaze, new age, math rock, and drone into its body of work, which constitutes one of the greatest under-recognized discographies in all of indie rock.” 
Aquarium Drunkard

What began as a chance encounter on an airplane between Brian McSweeney and Shawn Rios 22 years ago grew into a decades long friendship which ignited the inevitable musical partnership that formed Chicago’s MIIRRORS. They reverse-engineered the usual process of becoming a band by prioritizing album creation over live performance while at their own pace, morphing the duo into a cohesive quintet of seasoned multi-instrumentalists along the way- veterans Dmitri Rakhuba, Andre Miller, and Patrick Riley completed the lineup and they quickly evolved the collective sound, momentarily trading the stage for the tracking room.

While recording, the group began self-releasing singles just three months before the pandemic took its toll on the music community, but not before the public took notice with their imagined “completed” version of Jeff Buckley’s rare 1997 four-track demo “Gunshot Glitter,” with Steven Edelstone of Paste Magazine professing, “No one has ever been able to recapture Buckley’s lightning-in-a-bottle essence since he passed in 1997. MIIRRORS come the closest of anyone.” As artists suddenly found themselves on a forced indefinite hiatus, MIIRRORS saw opportunities for further creation despite the industry stalemate: documenting a live set at Narwhal Studios in the upcoming self-directed Definitive Version, filming their video for “Nightwalk” in a barren, beautiful late evening Chicago landscape during the height of the shutdown, featuring their single “Sinistry” as the lead-off track on the acclaimed Situation Chicago! 2 CIVL benefit vinyl compilation, and writing material beyond their first album while simultaneously working on their eventual live performance.

Stagnancy has not been an option, yet the band has maintained a low profile. Fast forward to a post-pandemic scene starving for live music, the group finally set sail with a series of packed hometown headline performances, immediately establishing a word of mouth reputation as a band to see. 
 
Recorded in Studio B at Electrical Audio along with sessions in Los Angeles and Nashville, their upcoming debut LP Motion And Picture (Pravda Records) is a cinematic soundscape of honest lyrical introspection and reactive abrasion, a personal timespan of disillusionment, resolve and return of hope. Waves of cascading textures blur the sonic lines between synthesizers and guitars a la My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive as Rios’s atypical rhythms anchor the songs while McSweeney’s voice ascends beyond Miller’s/ Riley’s/ Rakhuba’s expanding colors.

Followers of MIIRRORS