Here's how the morning has gone. My friend Angella sent me links to a band named Balmorhea, who she learned about from her cousin's husband's ActiveListener podcast.
Balmorhea have a recent album All Is Wild, All Is Silent. They're a six-piece instrumental band from Austin: guitars, violin, cello, double bass, sometimes banjo, drums, and keys. It's slow, thoughtful, and elegiac -- not unlike Godspeed You Black Emperor in places, but with shorter songs and fewer huge-big-loud crescendos.
Here's their song "Remembrance":
Here's Balmorhea doing "Night Squall" in a French courtyard:
So, of course I go to Balmorhea's website and see they're coming to SF in March at the Bottom of the Hill, at which I've mostly seen noisy rock bands. Balmorhea is on tour opening for a Danish band called Efterklang, so I had to find out about them.
Here's a rather Sufjanesque song by Efterklang with a charming animation video, "Mirador."
And here's Efterklang's "Cutting Ice into Snow," which you see when first visiting their website.
The "Cutting Ice into Snow" video features imagery from In a Dream, a documentary about a Philadelphia tile-and-glass mosaic artist named Isaiah Zagar. He has made an installation you can visit called The Magic Garden.
Here's another excerpt from the movie with him talking:
That's probably enough for one post.
