"I love singing for people," says Allison Crowe. "It's a way to connect and share with others. Communication is crucial. Just being able to do what I do, to write and sing and perform, makes me feel not only alive, but incredibly lucky. Knowing at any moment everything could change, I don't take one second for granted."

“Allison sings with such an intensity of emotion, it's easy to see why she's often quoted as saying 'Why music? Why breathing?',” notes culture blog Muruch. “That kind of artistic passion seems extremely rare these days."

Crowe's home is Corner Brook, NL. Her birthplace is Nanaimo, BC (November 16, 1981). From Canada's coasts she's taken the road less-traveled to harmonizing life as musician (voice, piano, guitar, fiddle, bodhran), composer, arranger, audio engineer & producer. From the lovely isle of Newfoundland her reach is global.

Ani DiFranco and Loreena McKennitt inspired the strong-willed Scorpio to create Rubenesque Records, her own label. Since 2001, via 26 albums, singles, EPs and compilations, Crowe's oeuvre nears 200 unique tracks embracing roots, rock, Celtic, folk, jazz, soul, Canadiana and Broadway.

Rubenesque's series of artistically and commercially successful releases includes: Lisa's Song+ 6 Songs (2001-3); Tidings (2003/4); Secrets (2004); Live at Wood Hall (2005); This Little Bird (2006); Little Light (2008); Spiral (2010); Arthur / Up to the Mountain (2011); Tidings Concert (2012); Newfoundland Vinyl (2013); Heavy Graces (2013); Songbook (2013/14); Souling (2014); Newfoundland Vinyl II (2014); Sylvan Hour (2015); Newfoundland Vinyl 3 (2015); Souling (Bonus Tracks Edition) (2015); Introducing / Heirs + Grievances (2016); .Great Island Wonder (2017); Welcome to Us: 1 & 2 (2018); Newfoundland Vinyl IV (2018); plus Pillars and Six More Songs (2020 releases). 

Broadcast highlights include a pair of one-hour television specials: “Allison Crowe: Inside Pandora’s Box” and “Tidings” (airing, for years, nationally across Canada).

Crowe performs solo and with band – LIN (cello, vocals), Sarah White (mandolin, guitar, vocals), Dave Baird (bass, vocals) – headlining concerts on hundreds of occasions in over a dozen countries.

Billed before Carol Ann Duffy, Britain’s Poet Laureate, and (the late) Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Master of the Queen's Music, "Canadian angel Allison Crowe gave one of the weekend's most magical moments," relates The Scotsman. 

In 2012, Allison Crowe thrilled with Canada's Royal Winnipeg Ballet singing and playing live-on-stage with dancers for "The Doorway – Scenes from Leonard Cohen".

Hollywood director Zack Snyder flew Crowe cross-continent to cameo in "Man of Steel" – covering "Ring of Fire" on-screen in 2013's Superman blockbuster. “I’m a big Johnny Cash fan. And I’m a big Allison Crowe fan," reveals Snyder (Dawn of the Dead, 300, Watchmen, Sucker Punch). "So the combination to me seemed like an awesome opportunity if we could make it happen.”

Crowe is Musical Director of "Newfoundland Vinyl" – a rollicking hit at the Gros Morne Theatre Festival each Summer (since 2012). Theatre Newfoundland and Labrador Artistic Director Jeff Pitcher, (who conceived the show), remarks: "No matter where she is in this world, that voice, that conviction, it crosses all borders."

"The first thing you notice about Allison Crowe is her voice. Rich and dark, it seems to come from a place most singers can only dream of accessing. Then there are the songs. Filled with raw passion and accompanied by Crowe's eloquent piano playing." Clodagh O'Connell (The Courier, Rolling Stone+) posits: "Elton John meets Edith Piaf".

"Soulful. Alive. Joyous. Grievous. Real, true, music is what I want to make," says Allison Crowe.

You can lend an ear.

When Clive Tanaka finally found his voice, he ended a family tradition of silence that stretched back half a century.
For 11 years, Clive almost never left his room in his family’s home outside of Sapporo on Hokkaido, Japan’s huge northern island. “I was hikikomori,” Clive explains, one of almost a million boys and young men in Japan who shut themselves away and withdraw from society. In Clive’s case, he stopped going to school and retreated to his room after sustained episodes of vicious hazing and harassment by older students, a chronic problem in Japanese public schools.
But even before his own withdrawal when he was 14, Clive had first-hand experience of what silence and isolation was like. “My grandfather was a Soviet prisoner of war until 1949. He was a very young soldier in the [Japanese] army in Manchuria towards the end of the Pacific War [World War II] and was a POW many years longer than he was a soldier.” He married when he returned and seemed OK. But while watching the Tokyo Olympics in 1964, he saw the Soviet Union flag carried by Russian athletes, and something snapped. He did not speak another word for 20 years.
When Clive became hikikomori in 1989, he had no computer or Internet for amusement, only books and magazines that his parents would leave by his door, on a tray with his meals, and television. One day, his older sister put in front of his door a big box of her cast-off magnetic tape cassettes of 70’s and 80’s disco, dance and electronic music. At night, Clive’s family heard him dancing and singing along. Which gave his mother an idea. One New Year’s Day, his mother left a Yamaha DX7 keyboard outside his room. As a young boy, Clive had learned to play the violin and recorder through the Suzuki method. Alone, he taught himself how to play the piano keyboard, using only the instruction manual. And Clive started writing his own music. He credits the music with helping him gradually emerge from isolation in 2000, although he remains painfully shy.
Clive’s music is an amalgam of Giorgio Moroder, Cerrone, ABBA, Andy Gibb, Paradise Frame, Zapp & Roger, Men At Work, Grandmaster Flash, Fatback, Kool & The Gang, King Tubby, Daft Punk, Air and The Tom Tom Club. One reason may be because of the influence of his sister’s tape cassettes. “I played them over and over and over, and it started to bother my sister and my parents. Japanese houses have thin walls so even when I turned the volume down, it annoyed them. My sister slipped a note under the door that said, ‘I will buy you some current popular rock music if you will just please stop playing my old cassettes! I didn’t mind hearing those songs the first thousand times but I don’t like them anymore.’ The next day, there was a pair of headphones outside my door!”
Clive is working on a full-length album to be released on (what else?) cassette in 2010.


SOBO - "Shadows' Reflect - Second Way" out now !

Download on ITunes : https://itunes.apple.com/fr/album/shadows-reflect-second-way/id719278734

Hailing from Montréal, post-punk-gaze outfit The City Gates returns with their awaited LP "Age of Resilience" via Icy Cold Records and their own imprint Velouria Recordz.
“By using guitars with lots of fuzz, reverb, and delay pedals, the band creates an incredibly beautiful ambient and energetic sound” -Justin Lam, Antidotes Magazine

TCG shared stages with Trisomie 21, Actors, Nothing, Bootblacks, Deserta, New Canyons, and more.

this is a page for old, unused songs from previous projects of ours (donovan edelstein, barrett shuler, matt silva, joey shartrand, stephen bouffard, matt schwartz)
find more recently made tracks from various incarnations of this collective:
soundcloud.com/goldyours
soundcloud.com/iwannagotospace
soundcloud.com/tricofroze

SC Hound is following