JM.
On a small corner lot in southeast Portland, Oregon, Jeffrey Martin holed up through the winter recording his quietly potent new album Thank God We Left The Garden. Long nights bled into mornings in the tiny shack he built in the backyard, eight feet by ten feet. What began as demos meant for a later visit to a proper studio became the album itself, spare and intimate and true. Recorded live and alone around two microphones, Jeffrey often held his breath to wait for the low diesel hum of a truck to pass one block over on the busy thoroughfare. During the coldest nights, he timed recording between the clicks of the oil coil heater cycling on and off.
Martin's fourth full length album, Thank God We Left The Garden was produced and engineered by JEFFREY himself, recalling, "There was a magic quality to the sounds I was getting in the shack with these two cheap microphones, some lucky recipe of time and place that allowed my voice and the way I play guitar and the shape of these new songs to come together with the kind of honesty I was craving."
So much has happened in the world since the release of his previous album One Go Around (heralded by No Depression as 'the poetry of America'), and Jeffrey has filled the time doggedly, but happily, touring the US and Europe, watching it all unfold in a stream of small town conversations and city sprawl. In a moment where depth is so often traded for the instantaneous, where tech billionaires are building rockets to escape the planet, where the dead-eyed stare of artificial intelligence is promising to existentially upend our world, and where divisiveness in our culture is breeding delusional levels of certainty, Jeffrey Martin's new record feels like a hopeful and fully human antidote.
LH.
Lou Hazel (Chris Frisina) was born in the rustic town of Olean, New York to a family of northeastern wiseacres and intelligent hillbillies who remain hell bent on living full, rich lives despite brutal winters in a persistent economic downturn. Runt of the litter, according to his only sister.
Not one to commit easily, he skirted the compulsive hunting and fishing tradition held close to his father’s heart - instead cultivating a sensitivity more suited to artists and vagabonds. In illustrations, his pen swirl meanders towards an eventual finish only understood upon completion – just as in his music.
In songwriting, Chris uses what can only be explained as a genetic link to ancestral angst and talent to search for his place in a world out of sync. Part unquiet soul. Part young fool. Chris hopes to share his observations on our shared journey through life in mutual search of something pure.
Chris continues to pull from a constant and pervasive sense of disquiet–gleaned from his childhood, solo travels, work experiences, sullen periods of insomnia and close friendships–to create mournful tones, pulsing with lost opportunity, longing and regret. Except for those few magical times, when it goes the other way.
