
A pair of musical explorers from Montreal, brothers Warren and Rich Valdmanis, explore a place far from the deep-freeze winters they shared in their native Canada. In their music, the sun shines over the rolling surf every day, the stars dance above the beach fire every night, and Mondays miraculously never come. 

Picnic, featuring Austin bassist Rick Watson and North African drummer Rubin Nizri, taps into a unique blend of harmonies, rhythms, and instruments to "Shanghai" listeners onto the well-provisioned ship Picnic as it sails briskly to island paradise. Picnic first left harbor shortly after 9/11 as a slightly irate folk-punk band in lower Manhattan (as evidenced on their first album, Stop What You're Doing), but the brothers have since tacked back to their beach fire origins, reflecting on the many long summer nights they spent playing guitars on the coast of Maine. Not a minute was wasted there, for the descent of each cold Montreal winter left them toasting their Dream of the Sun. Check out the Picnic. You’re going to like it.      
 
Recorded on the coast of Maine during some characteristically cold and sea-blown weather, Dream of the Sun is an ode to the tropical-hammock-umbrella-drink paradise of Picnic's imagination. The album was engineered and mixed by Steve Drown (James Cotton, Charlie Musselwhite, Patty Larkin, Ron Carter) at The Studio in Portland, Maine.
 
The sound, instrumentation, and lyrics are drawn from many traditions – the rumba-inspired beats of Southern Africa (THANK YOU VUSI MAHLASELA FOR YOUR CAMEO) to the twang of old Kentucky Bluegrass, with excursions along the way to pick up steel drums, Mexican trumpets, and intricate gospel harmonies. 

Warren encourages you to listen to this music, literally and figuratively, “on the porch.”  

07 Block Island

thepicnicband

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