Pegstar Presents: Blackbird Blackbird & Chad Valley

Rudyard’s presents Pegstar Presents: Blackbird Blackbird & Chad Valley. With Shallou.

Blackbird Blackbird (Honolulu –> San Francisco –> Los Angeles)
http://blackbirdblackbird.net/

Blackbird Blackbird is the recording project of San Francisco-based electronic musician Mikey Maramag.

His warm, textural synth pop and distant, dreamy vocals recall acts like Four Tet and Washed Out, though Maramag’s roots are actually in metal and hardcore.

Originally hailing from Hawaii, he relocated to Northern California and began his career as the drummer for Bay Area hardcore band Murder Practice. He left the band in 2009 to attend the University of California in Santa Cruz where he took an interest in electronic music and became enamored with artists like Aphex Twin and Modeselektor.

While away at school he began recording under the alias Bye Bye Blackbird, eventually tweaking the name to Blackbird Blackbird after encountering another band with the same name. He released various singles before issuing his debut album, Summer Heart, in mid-2010. His blissed-out, sunny dream pop was well-received and he signed with San Francisco indie Lavish Habits to release his follow-up EP, 2012’s Boracay Planet. Tours of the U.S. and Europe followed as he continued to evolve his live set-up and in 2013, it was announced he had signed to prominent San Francisco electronic label Om Records who released his second LP, Tangerine Sky, in June 2014. ~ Timothy Monger

Chad Valley (Oxford, UK)
http://www.chadvalley.net/

After taking his bedroom recordings to the next level with a full band in Jonquil, Oxford-based Hugo Manuel went back to recording as a solo artist under the name Chad Valley. Jonquil signed to Dovecote Records in the States and, around the same time, Manuel leaked a handful of dreamy, Ibiza and R&B-inspired electro-pop demos to the Web.

A flock of sites (including Vice, Pitchfork, and Guardian) featured Chad Valley’s “Up and Down” and “Acker Bilk” in the summer of 2010. Manuel continued to play with Jonquil, and debuted his self-titled Chad Valley EP later that year. In 2011, a second EP, Equatorial Ultravox, was released, followed a year later by his album debut Young Hunger, which featured a long list of indie A-List collaborators including Twin Shadow, Glasser, Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs, and Active Child. Valley’s follow-up effort, the more introspective Entirely New Blue, arrived in October 2015. ~ Jason Lymangrover