Friday, August 28
MY NEW BAND BELIEVE
with Ryley Walker
8 pm doors
$20 advance / $25 doors
all ages
My New Band Believe, led by Cameron Picton, bassist and sometime frontman of black midi, with whom he practiced an explosive form of musical world-building, weaving complex storytelling through thrilling passages of controlled chaos. The moniker serves as an open invitation, a subtle nod to listeners willing to meet the music on its own terms, to reap the rewards of taking a flying leap into the dark. Picton leads his band so that each track forms, scatters and re-groups, the uplift of one song crashing head-long into the rush of another. Inspired by Bert Jansch’s hypnotic, hard-driving guitar, Judee Sill’s panoramic pop, and the terrifying possibility of dance music, My New Band Believe is both all-encompassing and constantly in flux. https://www.mynewbandbelieve.com/
Ryley Walker currently resides in New York City. But his latest LP is a Chicago record in spirit. The masterful Course In Fable, the songwriter’s fifth solo effort, draws from the deep well of that city’s fertile 1990s scene, when bands like Tortoise, The Sea and Cake and Gastr del Sol were reshaping the underground, mixing and matching indie rock, jazz, prog and beyond.
Walker spent his formative years in Chicago, absorbing those heady sounds and finding ways to make them his own. Even though he emerged at first in folk- rock troubadour mode, it makes sense that he’s arrived at this point; each LP has grown more intricate and assured, his influences distilling into something original and unusual. To put it simply: Course In Fable is Walker’s best record yet, full of active imagination and endless possibilities.
Last October, Ryley went straight to one of the primary architects of the Chicago sound to make the LP. John McEntire, Course In Fable’s producer/engineer/ mixer, can rightly be called a legend for his work with Tortoise, Stereolab, The Red Krayola, Jim O’Rourke and countless others over a prolific career that now spans more than three decades. Seeing his name in an album’s liners is pretty much a trademark of quality.
