In two decades on the road Jeffrey Foucault has become one of the most distinctive voices in American music, refining a sound instantly recognizable for its simplicity and emotional power. With a string of critically acclaimed studio albums – “Stark, literate songs that are as wide open as the landscape of his native Midwest” (The New Yorker), "Beat-up troubadour folk whittled to dolorous perfection” (Uncut), “Songwriting Brilliance,” (Irish Times) – he’s built a brick-and-mortar international touring career and a devoted following, one that includes luminaries like Van Dyke Parks, Greil Marcus, and Don Henley.
In September of 2024 Jeffrey Foucault released THE UNIVERSAL FIRE (Fluff & Gravy, 9/6/24), his first album of entirely new material since 2018. A series of high-voltage performances cut live in one room, the album is both a working wake – Foucault lost his best friend and drummer Billy Conway, to cancer in 2021 – and a meditation on the nature of beauty, artifact, and loss.
Augmenting Foucault's all-star band with members of Calexico and Bon Iver (drummer John Convertino and producer/saxophonist Mike Lewis) THE UNIVERSAL FIRE sets Conway’s death against the massive 2008 fire at the Universal Studios lot in California that destroyed the master recordings of some of our bedrock American music, to interrogate ideas about mortality, legacy, meaning, and calling.
John Convertino is better known as one half of the gifted Calexico and also drummer for Giant Sand. As a composer he is known for his dreamshaped accordion pieces, lilting piano meditations on Satie, silent and beautiful cornerstones within Calexico's oeuvre. Now there is Ragland, his first solo album, recorded at his home in Tucson, Arizona using nothing but two micraphones, a solitary piano, vibes and a drumset all recorded onto a small 8-track analogue recorder. Ragland is Monk playing Eno high on Verdi. It's broken ambient music; twelve instrumentals that are beautiful, dark and often take brutal turns. Arpeggios from an old piano set the beat and the progress of chord changes search for light and relief. This is a monumental piano-led album, challenging this most moving of genres into a more emotionally varied trawl through ups and downs, all within this master-musician's unique genreless vision.
Erik Koskinen is an American singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, whose music is not categorized by sub-genres. Stylistically he is on his own. Influenced by roots music of the Americas and the world, the rhythmic integrity and musical tone are as important as the lyrical content and the artistic intent.
“Mann’s melodies, a combination of country grit and folky singer/songwriter assuredness, roped you in from the moment they wafted across the bar and into your ears.” – Mark Griffin, The Cap Times
Whitney Mann is a seasoned singer-songwriter whose key goal is to make people feel during her shows; to peer into the depth of their human experience and examine the view. But she also wants people to laugh, to howl at the absurdity of life. And, with her trusted Larrivée acoustic guitar strapped to her chest, she threads that needle with ease.