Party: The Antlers w/ Shaprece and Musée Mécanique

Party: The Antlers w/ Shaprece and Musée Mécanique

McMenamins, KPSU and Eleven Magazine present

Wednesday, April 1

The Antlers
Shaprece
Musée Mécanique

7 p.m. doors, 8 p.m. show
All ages welcome
$17 advance, $20 day of show
Presented By:


The Antlers
In seven years together, Brooklyn's The Antlers have created a quiet revolution in thought and sound with their harrowing and often haunted tales of love unmoored, human frailty and emotional evisceration.

On Familiars, their fifth album, The Antlers, vocalist / guitarist Peter Silberman, multi-instrumentalist Darby Cicci, and drummer Michael Lerner, have resumed the journey they began with 2009's Hospice and continued over the next two albums Burst Apart and Undersea, which found the trio picking their way through a labyrinth of fear, doubt, love and loss against a backdrop of layered textural songs that were as deeply atmospheric as they were anthemic.

More hopeful in mood than its predecessors, the new album emanates a palpable release of despair and an almost operatic verve on nine songs that took shape over the past year and a half.

Familiars moves the Antlers' emotional and spiritual odyssey further, alongside a palette of sounds that soar and retreat under a canopy of electronic trappings and the steady arrhythmic heartbeat of Lerner's unnerving drumming. A choir of funereal horns function as a second voice across the songs.
"I wrote the trumpet arrangements as a sort of emotional antagonist," explains Cicci.



"In some ways it acts as more of conscience to an otherwise omniscient narrator. Other times, it's about giving a voice and personality to the dark, unsympathetic nature of reality, as an obstacle to the narrator's quest for enlightenment."

This duality is a persistent force throughout the record, guiding an exploration of the divided self and giving rise to the idea of a Familiar, rather like a guardian angel, your shadow, or your consciousness.

"If there was ever a time when you felt completely lost and you were able to appear to yourself, to give yourself advice and shed light on your situation, what would that be like?" asks Silberman.

Familiars not only shows what that would be like, it demonstrates how that's achieved over the arc of nine songs.

"I wanted to explore that conversation we're constantly having with ourselves throughout our lives. So I began to write and sing as two sides of the same person, as estranged twins trying to find each other in a shared mind, and eventually traveling together through a maze of malleable memories."

"For awhile, I've been focused on what it means to be present, and how difficult that can be, living in a world created by your past. The past can be a comfortingly painful place, and it's easy to get stuck there. In that sense, I think of Familiars as a rescue mission."

It took The Antlers a year and a half to transform that world into a symbolic and musical language. Recorded by the band at their studio in Brooklyn, Familiars represents an evolution in the band's musicianship and creative process.

"I'm not sure we really were having any kind of synchronicity back when we started the record. We came together into that through the recording," says Cicci.

"We became really obsessed with Alice Coltrane's Journey in Satchidananda, Charles Mingus' The Black Saint and The Sinner Lady, and Miles Davis' Bitches Brew," he adds. "In the context of starting a record, they represented an almost spiritual self-expression, fugue-like repetition of themes, and the liberation of using pure discovery as a finished work."

"We wanted to connect to the humanity of music from the past," adds Silberman. "To capture grace and the heart within those performances."

So this time around The Antlers made a soul record in the truest sense of the word. Sure, they inundated themselves with Al Green, Nina Simone, and The Memphis Boys, but really they were making music about that mysterious and ineffable part of yourself. The metaphysics behind the physics: They found that they had made a record that was able to express the unseen.



Website:
http://antlersmusic.com/

Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/TheAntlers
Shaprece

Drawing from an eclectic palette of musical influences, Shaprece's latest artistic direction ranges from electronic beats to orchestral arrangement, soulful vocals to ambient soundscapes. Blending digitally altered tones with sultry and smoky vocals, she has aspired to create a category to call her own. Throughout the creative process, she's gathered inspiration from the likes of Bjork, Little Dragon, and Aaliyah, among others, forming a pleasant fusion of dreamy melodies and atmospheric sounds on her new album.



Shaprece, along with electro-ambient producer IG88, has been working on new material in her hometown of Seattle, WA over the past year. Also involved with the composition and arrangement of the project have been Phillip Peterson (A$AP Rocky/Florence + The Machine, P!NK, Santigold), and Daniel Butman, both brought in for strings and other orchestral elements. The album has been recorded back and forth between IG88's home studio and the legendary Robert Lang Studios.

In March 2014 she released the first taste of the new material, a double-single called "Tell Me // Her Song" ahead of her SXSW dates. Following up on those tracks she dropped the 'Molting EP' in July heading into her appearances at Summer and Fall festivals such as The Capitol Hill Block Party, Bumbershoot, Rifflandia and the CMJ Music Marathon.

2015 is already shaping up to be a big year for her as the debut full length album is being readied for release and appearances at 35 Denton, Treefort Music Festival and Sasquatch are all coming up soon.





Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/shaprecemusic

Website:
http://www.shaprece.com

Invited: Jessica Breedlove Latham, Beth Martin, Sarah Celine Staben, Matthew Ellis, Brett Kenneson, Ryan Dornfeld, Becca Pollard, Matthew Sturgeon, Ian Imhof, Luis Garcia, Stacey Villalobos, Kelly Cramer, Drew Bandy, Austin Baranko, Jenny Carrizo Smith, Adria Ivanitsky, Tom Chamberlain, Jennie Archambault, Bonnie Lipai, Ellie McConnell, Linneas Boland-Godbey, Andria Ewald, Allie Whittaker, Hollister Dixon, Kathu DeLaney, Anden Oquendo, Katherine Conrad, Mariel Elise, Pete Bejarano, Kenric L. Ashe, Patrick Vroman, Drew Sprouse, Reid MacDonald, Jacob Wordes, Susan Smallsreed, Quartzog Quazar, Dillon Nadler, La'anah Kimah, Zachary Ellis, Yuri Ohno, JaneAnne Peterson, Tyler Sorg, Vee Va Kampo, Megan Klee, Chelsea Lofton, Ike Miller, Jorge Bello, Ben Dorothy, Taryn Ralph, Broq Grnfll, Kiandra Panda Cole, Genesy Rogers, Kali Marie, Nicholas Meyer, Alyssa Crooke, Colby James Albertson, Kelsey Kim, Sophia Levenson, Daniel Freimark, Nathan Fisher, Abbie Zanone, Jenna Marie Fletcher, Nick Haley, Lindsey Moffett, Jack Garibay, Jessi Anjuli, Joe Friedman, Michael Grewe, Gregg Dix, Nathan Tobias, Jonah Majure, Jacqueleen Rae, Jarrell Townsend, J.T. Howard, Johnathan Fain, Anthony Lee, Nicole Senders, Dylan Thurlow McCloud-Lewis, Gianni Sampson, Rachelle Schmid, Jabriel Donohue, Anamilé Mispireta, Sarah Albright, Miles Millsz Strubel, Mackenzie Pearce, Victoria Vaz, Graham Marlitt, Dan Well Markus, Jacob White, Thomas Worth, Lindsey McEvoy, Jay L. Pekelder, Jordann Wallis, Sarika Ramakrishnan, Ryan Price, Tessa Schultz, Mark R Rienstra, Daniel Ellis, Kate Grube, Robinson Eaton show more »