Pegstar Presents: Quilt * Mutual Benefit

Rudyard’s and Pegstar Concerts present Quilt * Mutual Benefit.

Quilt (Boston, MA)
http://www.quiltband.com/

“Either they replicate specific moments in the history of 20th-century American music that we cannot concretely pin down, or they are designed to reflect a set of unwritten expectations and parameters”- Pitchfork

“Quilt are from Boston and they sound appropriately collegiate, like they learned all their harmonizing from the Harvard a cappella group.”- The Fader

“Kind of woodsy but more colourful and tripped out on the neo-mystical vibbraaationssss.”- RoseQuartz

“Three part harmonies, drunken melodies”- Impose Magazine

QUILT was formed in late 2008 in Boston, MA.  Shane Butler, Anna Fox Rochinski and Taylor McVay met at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, and spent the next couple of years honing a strange yet magnetic ramshackle sound in the smoke-filled basements and living rooms of Jamaica Plain and Allston. They released a home-made tape in 2009, touring DIY style around the northeast in a 1993 Buick Roadmaster.

In Spring/Summer 2010, the trio recorded a collection of seven songs in the home of Jesse Gallagher, in Cambridge. The following winter, after Taylor’s amicable departure from Quilt, John Andrews was recruited and subsequently plucked from the suburbs of New Jersey to join the band on a tour to SXSW.

It was around this time that those seven songs had made their way to the big guy’s desk at Mexican Summer records in Brooklyn, via former Captured Tracks label manager Katie Garcia (a friend from the college years in Boston). The band returned to Cambridge and recorded three more songs, now with the songwriting input and drumming from John.

Quilt’s self-titled ten-song debut was released in November 2011 on Mexican Summer to positive reviews from critics and the band began touring in support of the record on and off for the next year or so.

Their following record, Held In Splendor, was recorded in Brooklyn with producer Jarvis Taveniere. Released in early 2014, the album ushered in another year of near-constant touring. The trio recruited New Hampshire-based bassist Keven Lareau for their live shows.

Nearly two years later, Quilt’s third full-length record, Plaza, will see the light of day on February 26th, 2016. Lead singles “Eliot St” and “Roller” have been met with praise and the group has full US and Europe tours lined up.

The band considers itself a New York-based band that formed in Boston.

The 4 members reside in Brooklyn, Upstate New York, and New Hampshire.

And as lovely as it was to tour in a 20-foot station wagon with faux-wood panelling, they eventually upgraded to a 12 passenger Chevy Express van. His name is Big Earl.

Mutual Benefit (NYC, NY)
http://www.mutualbenef.it/

“It takes more than just a fleeting dream to set us free,” sings Jordan Lee on “Skipping Stones” the titular track on Mutual Benefit’s newest album, Skip a Sinking Stone. It’s a truism that still holds power, and it acts as a sort of missive for the entire album: a two-part meditation on impermanence that also acts as a portrait of growing up.

Skip a Sinking Stone takes place after the success of Love’s Crushing Diamond, with Lee settled into a life that passes as steady. The first half of the record, awash in warm string arrangements and hope, is written about the year that followed: Mutual Benefit’s rotating cast of friends and collaborators is touring non-stop, playing professional stages and festivals (including Pitchfork and FORM Arcosanti), and Lee is in love. “Getting Gone” chugs along with the easy rhythm of a van pulling onto the freeway, settling into the zen-like blankness of rolling along from city to city, show to show. “We can see stars from here / why would we go back anywhere,” sings Lee from the glowing swells of “Lost Dreamers,” taking solace in moments of freedom on the road even as touring routinizes from a utopic pursuit into a day job. The album title is itself pulled from such a moment: pulling off the road to skip stones with the band, seeing how long they could be kept above water before finally sinking.

The second half of the album finds Lee in New York, in a rare position of having the time and resources to work on the new record full-time. Lee lives and records at the Silent Barn, breaking from his usual nomadic lifestyle to explore staying in one place, reflected musically by a comparative stillness and introspection. However, New York life presents another kind of unreality: one colored by growing depression, a downturn in the relationship, and a city in turmoil, the atmosphere heavy with grief and anger in the wake of the Eric Garner verdict and resulting Black Lives Matter protests (an environment which informed “City Sirens”). The closing track, “The Hereafter,” returns to the image of the skipping stone, following it as it sinks. “I kept coming back to how nice that was, throwing these stones against the water,” says Lee. “I thought it was a fitting metaphor for the endeavors I have in my life—sometimes they work out and sometimes they don’t. I think it’s a good exercise in accepting impermanence and failure and these things that are constant, and yet the activity of skipping stones is really relaxing and beautiful. But in another sense you’re just letting these stones sink each time.”

Mutual Benefit’s debut LP Love’s Crushing Diamond was praised for being vulnerable and warmhearted and Skip a Sinking Stone is equally so, patiently built from carefully chosen lines illustrated by lush astral folk and intricately composed arrangements that manage to appear effortless. Each stone ultimately sinks, but, as Lee sings on the album’s zenith—a comforting folk track first written for the Shaking Through series—as the cycle ends and repeats again all we can do is maintain the hope that it’s “Not for Nothing.”

The bulk of Skip a Sinking Stone was recorded during Lee’s residency at the Silent Barn in Brooklyn, both on his own and in Gravesend Recording Studios with Carlos Hernandez and Julian Fader from Ava Luna. Stone is shaped by collaborations with friends and recurring members of Mutual Benefit’s rotating cast: further recording work was done with Mutual Benefit drummer Dillon Zahner in Boston and violinist Jake Falby in New Hampshire, and the record contains guitar by Mike Clifford, vocals from Lee’s sister Whitney (also a touring member of the band following Diamond), flute by Noah Klein (Cuddle Formation) on “Getting Gone,” and keys by Dan Goldberg (The Spookfish). The record was mixed by Brian Deck (The Moon and Antarctica, The Shepherd’s Dog, Ugly Casanova).

TWITTER: https://twitter.com/QUILTMUSIC
TWITTER: https://twitter.com/mutual_benefit