Second Wave of Artists for Treefort 2023

YAYA BEY

(Brooklyn, New York)

Yaya Bey is one of R&B’s most exciting storytellers. Using a combination of ancestral forces and her own self-actualization, the singer/songwriter seamlessly navigates life’s hardships and joyful moments through music.

Bey’s new album, Remember Your North Star (released June 2022), captures this emotional rollercoaster with a fusion of soul, jazz, reggae, afrobeat and hip-hop that feeds the soul. The artist’s knack for storytelling is best displayed in the album’s lead single, “keisha”. It’s an anthemic embodiment of fed-up women everywhere who have given their all in a relationship, yet their physical body nor spiritual mind could never be enough.

Bey’s ability to tap into the emotionally kaleidoscopic nature of women, specifically Black women, is the essence of the entire album. With themes of misogynoir, unpacking generational trauma, carefree romance, parental relationships, women empowerment and self-love, ‘Remember Your North Star’ proves that the road to healing isn’t a linear one – there are many lessons to gather along the journey.

There is no fakeness when it comes to Bey’s music, and her authenticity can be partly attributed to her upbringing in Jamaica, Queens. Early childhood memories included watching her father (pioneering ‘90s rapper Grand Daddy I.U) record in his studio – which also doubled as Bey’s bedroom – and listening to records by soul legends Donny Hathaway and Ohio Players around the house. Beginning at age nine, the artist’s father would leave space for her to write hooks to his beats, using her favorite artists like Mary J. Blige and JAY-Z as inspirations.

Bey is also a critically acclaimed multidisciplinary artist and art curator, creating the artwork for her music through collages of intimate photos and self-portraits. In 2019, her work was featured in the District of Columbia Arts Center’s “Reparations Realized” exhibit and Brooklyn’s Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA)’s “Let the Circle Be Unbroken” exhibit. She also completed multiple fine art residencies with MoCADA, curating programs that reflect the same theme that drives her music: the Black woman’s experience.

WHITNEY

(Chicago, Illinois)

After the breakup of Smith Westerns in 2014, guitarist Max Kakacek joined with drummer Julien Ehrlich, who also played drums for Unknown Mortal Orchestra, to form Whitney.

The Chicago-based roommates and music-making duo released their third and most recent studio album, Spark, in 2022. 

Spark reintroduces Whitney as a contemporary syndicate of classic pop, its dozen imaginative and endearing tracks wrapping fetching melodies around paisley-print Dilla beats and luxuriant electronics. What’s more, Whitney reduces three years of extreme emotional highs and lows into 38 brisk but deep minutes, each of these 12 tracks a singable lesson in what it is they (and, really, we) have all survived. The recalcitrant ennui of opener “Nothing Remains,” the devastating loss of “Terminal,” the sun-streaked renewal of “REAL LOVE”: However surprising it may sound, Spark is less a radical reinvention for Whitney than an honest accounting of how it feels when you move out of your past and into your present, when you take the next steps of your lives and careers at once and without apology. Spark maintains the warmth and ease of Whitney’s early work; these songs glow with the newness of now.

LOUIS COLE BIG BAND

(Los Angeles, California)

Louis Cole is a Los Angeles-based singer songwriter, Grammy awarded producer, composer and multi-instrumentalists. Celebrated as one of the world’s most future-sonic-funk drummers and co-founder of KNOWER, his mission is “to create deep feelings through music.”

Cole has proudly been DIY to date, amassing millions of views with his viral videos like ‘Bank Account’, international tours and debut album Time released on Brainfeeder.

Known for presenting a show that you will never forget, Louis Cole’s powerful stage presence invites you into his broad and deep sound world. As a multi-instrumentalist his writing is a blend of quickfire, hook-laden electro-funk bullets, wistful humor and soft-focus deep balladry. Always performing from the heart of his vastly imaginative emotional portrait, Louis Cole’s songs evolve with his live concerts that feature his 18-piece brass band, to full brass ensembles with WDR Bob Mintzer, solo shows, or with his 4-piece jazz format.

At the forefront of redefining what jazz, electronics and cinematics sounds like; Louis Cole long time collaborators also flavour his sonic mix, notably Thundercat, Genevieve Artadi, Dennis Hamm to and acclaimed jazz pianist and experimental composer Brad Mehldau who featured on his album Time.  

Treefort is thrilled to welcome Louis Cole and his Big Band for a show that none of us will forget. 

THANYA IYER

(Montreal, Quebec, Canada)

Thanya Iyer is an enigmatic songwriter who crafts sparkling experimental pop music.

Her live band, with Pompey, Daniel Gélinas, and Shaina Hayes, wields acoustic and electronic instruments to flesh out these serene, spiritual compositions. Thanya and the band’s arrangements empower listeners to embrace mindfulness, aesthetic beauty and the interconnectedness of all things. After their 2020 Polaris long-listed, sophomore visual album Kind, the band recently released their new EP, rest, in the summer of 2022.

DEBBY FRIDAY

(Toronto, Ontario, Canada)

A self-described experimentalist, born in Nigeria, raised in Montreal, and now working in Vancouver; DEBBY FRIDAY is an anomaly.

Her work spans the spectrum of the audio-visual, resisting categorizations of genre and artistic discipline. She is at once a sound theorist and musician, composer and performer, video artist, poet and punk god. In 2018, she released her first self-produced EP, titled BITCHPUNK, to reverberating underground acclaim. Friday’s multi-disciplinary practice explores themes of ritual and feminine aggression as well as discourses of power, forces of diaspora and the aesthetics of eroticism.

Her sophomore release, the DEATH DRIVE EP, came out during the summer of 2019, on Deathbomb Arc, to staggering critical acclaim. DEATH DRIVE has features from NON Worldwide’s, Chino Amobi, and labelmate Lana Del Rabies but was written, produced and engineered entirely by FRIDAY herself. Despite zero publicists being involved in the marketing of this album – the EP received Bandcamp Album of the Day, and glowing reviews from Pitchfork, The Quietus, The Wire, The Fader, The Needle Drop, and many, many others.

DEBBY got her start as a DJ, opening for acts including Mykki Blanco and Princess Nokia. She has done mixes for NTS, Thump and Noisey and has collaborated on tracks w/ Clipping, Deli Girls, DJ Haram and Ouri.

THE HEAVY HEAVY

(Brighton, United Kingdom)

The Heavy Heavy create the kind of unfettered rock-and-roll that warps time and place, immediately pulling the audience into a euphoric fugue state with its own sun-soaked atmosphere.

Led by lifelong musicians Will Turner and Georgie Fuller, the Brighton, UK-based band began with a shared ambition of “making records that sound like our favorite records ever,” and soon arrived at a reverb-drenched collision of psychedelia and blues, acid rock and sunshine pop. As revealed on their gloriously hazy debut EP Life and Life Only, The Heavy Heavy breathe an incandescent new energy into sounds from decades ago, transcending eras with a hypnotic ease.

In dreaming up Life and Life Only, The Heavy Heavy tapped into many of the musical touchstones that Turner describes as “deeply entrenched in our psyche”: Peter Green-era Fleetwood Mac, the Rolling Stones, British Invasion pop acts like the Hollies, folk-blues duo Delaney & Bonnie, to name just a few. Pushing past the confines of reverential pastiche, the band imbues their output with a strangely charmed quality and heady authenticity undeniably tied to their status as artists on the fringe, both philosophically and geographically. To that end, Turner hails from the remote town of Malvern, an enchanted stretch of the English countryside once frequented by the likes of Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath and Kate Bush. “It’s famous for the healing qualities of its water, and there are ancient trees where the Druids used to worship – there’s a sort of magical-hippie aspect to it,” he notes. Fuller, meanwhile, elevates every track with her spellbinding vocals and magnetic yet wholly unaffected presence, building upon a kaleidoscopic career that’s included performing at Montreux Jazz Festival as a teenager as well as acting in the London theater.

Rooted in their effusive harmonies and fuzzed-out guitar work, Life and Life Only contains the first track Turner and Fuller ever recorded as The Heavy Heavy, a lilting piece of psych-pop titled “Go Down River.” “I’d had this song a while and couldn’t quite finish it, but then once Georgie added her vocals it all came together,” Turner recalls. “The male-female harmonies gave it this whole new sound; it just felt like lying in the green grass on a hot sunny day.”

Self-produced in a London flat, the six-track project also brings that transportive power to songs like “Miles and Miles” (a bright and jangly number whose whirlwind velocity calls to mind late-’60s/early-’70s road dramas like Easy Rider and Vanishing Point), “Man of the Hills” (a groove-heavy homage to Turner’s otherworldly hometown), and “Sleeping on Grassy Ground” (a sweetly languid epic featuring a near-operatic vocal performance from Fuller, a classically trained singer).

With their full-length debut due out in 2023, The Heavy Heavy recently expanded their lineup to five members, allowing for an even more vast and bombastic sound now touched with heavenly four-part harmonies. A massively prolific outfit who’ve written and recorded hundreds of songs in the last two years alone, the band feels perpetually inspired by the pursuit of making music that provides a rarefied pleasure. “The driving force behind all our songwriting is to feel good, and to make other people feel good too,” Fuller points out. And thanks to their uncanny grace as sonic alchemists, The Heavy Heavy ultimately perform a certain magic with their music: eliciting a sublime daze that goes far beyond pure escapism.

HARPY

(Providence, Rhode Island)

HARPY is the collaboration of cult musical/performance artists Gyna Bootleg (Tinsel Teeth, Sire, Vomitatrix) and Pippi Zornoza (Rectrix, Bonedust, Vvltvre), who have been pushing at the boundaries of the U.S. underground for nearly a quarter of a century.

Harpy lends their atmospheric sonic musings and manic vocals to a multi-layered aggression that is both deeply haunted and utterly relentless. The shriek of this mythological creature as it rips your bowels in order to tell your fortune. The manic psychological space of one becoming unhinged.

CHARLIE HICKEY

(Pasadena, California)

Charlie Hickey’s debut album, Nervous At Night, began with a journey. Having grown up in Pasadena, in the quiet shadow of downtown Los Angeles, Hickey moved away to college at the same time that he got more serious about music, and found himself moving back and forth between his hometown and his newfound independence to play around with song ideas and demos with his friend and collaborator Marshall Vore.

These two worlds reveal themselves in numerous forms across Nervous At Night, as Hickey explores life’s graceless passage between teenage years and adulthood, and all of the noise that permeates

Nervous At Night comes alive in its juxtapositions, chronicling the constant push and pull of life, both its stagnancy and motion in refreshing and honest ways. Chiefly through, this is an album about connection, how even through those struggles we rely on the people around us to keep moving forwards. “I’d like to write songs that are for everyone, that let people into my inner world while also hopefully making people feel less alone on their own. I hope that these songs can be there for somebody the way my favorite songs have been for me.”

TROPA MAGICA

(Los Angeles, California)

Psychedelic cumbia garage punk rock band Tropa Magica was founded by brothers David (guitar, vocals) and Rene Pacheco (drums, vocals).

Having toured nationally and on multiple southwest and west coast tours, they have supported established acts such as Bomba Estereo, Molotov, and comedian Felipe Esparza. The band has boldly and successfully taken on larger LA stages at venues such as The Microsoft Theater, El Rey Theater and The Hollywood Palladium. In 2018 and 2019 Tropa Magica performed at So-Cal festival favorites Desert Daze and Tropicalia. At the end of 2019 the band self released a limited edition 7inch vinyl EP Smells Like Cumbia, featuring Nirvana songs as cumbia renditions. Despite the pandemic, 2020 was been a fruitful year for the band. They wrote and recorded the theme song for comedian Felipe Esparza’s new Netflix special and collaborated with the notorious Foo’s Gone Wild on the “Foo Files Cumbia” track released earlier this year. The band has partnered up as ambassadors with 805/Firestone Beer and is sponsored by Fender guitars and Ernie Ball.

DIRT MILLER

(Spokane, Washington)

Dirt Miller is an American multi-instrumentalist and songwriter who has been entrenched in music his entire life.

With a saga to tell about a life lived hard, and a recovery fought for even harder, Dirt’s guitar virtuosity combined with his unique singing style and interpretation of humble melodies and lyrics paint a lush scenario of Americana soul. His early influences like Bob Dylan, Cat Stevens, James Taylor, and Led Zeppelin, echo in his songs.

Music that comes from pure instinct and deep roots in American folklore and blues history, influenced by the majestic lands of this country and spirituality. Dirt Miller’s music (co-produced by composer Max DiCarlo) is comprised of real instrumentation – cellos, violins and percussion creating a surreal world of images and emotion. Telling the human story with eloquence, fierceness, beauty and a personal edge that hearkens to one’s inner soul, Dirt showcases a dynamic mastery of technical guitar playing matched with a gritty sultry voice that is sure to cut straight to your heart strings – always leaving you wanting more. All written from his true-life experience, the music speaks for itself.

MAGI MERLIN

(Montreal, Quebec, Canada)

Magi Merlin (MADGE-eye) grew up in Saint-Lazare, Canada. A place that may sound unfamiliar to you, but rest assured it is a lot closer to home than you realize.

A wet dream created by people like Nixon in the 70s, a place for white folks, by white folks. The suburbs is the epitome of “normal” unless of course you replace white with black, straight with queer, that is when normalcy is challenged. This, amongst other subjects – such as the impact of capitalism on art, nepotism, the relationship one has to taking pleasure in belonging to those things while rejecting them all – is what drives and inspires the creative universe behind Gone Girl, Merlin’ latest and most audacious effort to date.

The EP draws on influences from 90’s house, drum and bass, Motown, to acid-flecked hip hop. Merlin’s voice, alongside Funkywhat’s recognizable production style, reminds you of a smoky after hours club – if the windows were shattered by bass lines, the walls leveled by 808s. The self-described “cheeky nihilist” combines jazzy scats, raps, and breakbeats together in her musical cauldron to address issues like generational angst, fake friends and casual racism.

It would not be entirely accurate to refer to Magi as only a singer or a songwriter. Music is indeed at the core of her creative universe, but her world expands beyond the medium. It is one that is equally visual as it is auditive, one that is continuously shaped through collaborations with fashion designers, photographers and video directors.

JUICE

(New York, New York)

Blending rock, pop, R&B, and hip-hop, Juice embraced the diversity of their signature sound early on.

The band – Ben Stevens, Christian Rose, Kamau Burton, Daniel Moss, Rami El-Abidin, and Miles Clyatt – formed in Boston while attending college. 

After graduating, the band recorded and released their first professional EP, 2018’s ‘Workin’ on Lovin’. With new music and two old minivans, the band hit the road for an almost non-stop year and a half of national touring. These collective experiences inspired 2019’s you are simply magnificent.

Juice was set for an exciting 2020. With a new trio of singles – “DiCaprio (Love Me All the Time)”, “Konoha”, and “Make Pretend” – the band was set to embark on their largest headline tour to date. The band’s 2020 tour was, of course, canceled. After spending three months apart (the longest the band had ever been separated since college) the boys were grateful to reunite and start creating something special. The mandatory respite from touring allowed for the band to embrace writing a longer project: Boy Story.

The project was preceded by three singles: “Superimposed,” “Girlfriend Song,” and “Do You Really Feel?” – which garnered press attention from Billboard, Ones to Watch, Line of Best Fit and more. Fall touring culminated in the release of Boy Story in December 2021, along with 2 sold out hometown shows in Boston and New York. The band recently wrapped up a tour supporting flipturn, and is set to release new music in 2023.