Kendall Lujan: Presented by Sou’wester Arts

Portland, Oregon based artist, Kendall Lujan embarks on her first full length album “Lucky Penny’ it is set to be released Fall 2024. After releasing her Debut self titled EP last Spring, featured on official playlist for Spotify and Apple Music. Lujan also gaining attention from NPR’s Tiny Desk, MTV and winning the John Lennon Songwriting contest. Sharing the stage with Amos Lee, Frazey Ford (of The Be Good Tanyas), Allie Crow Buckley, Early James, and The Magnetic Fields.

‘Lucky Penny’ features many genres Including Jazz, Folk, Bosa Nova and Indie-Rock. The natural singer and songwriter put together a studio band with Micah Hummel (drums), Colin Schmidt (bass) and Alex Milsted (piano) and recorded at the Map Room Studio in Portland, Oregon with Dominik Schmidt producing.

Her writing is real, introspective and reflective. After touring the songs in Europe twice this past Fall Lujan is ready to show her versatility and growth as an artist. The first single to be released late March 2024 titled ‘Goodbyes’. The song explores mourning and loss of important people in your world. In the sense of ending romantic relationships it explores the process of knowing when someone isn’t suited for your life or growth any longer. Lujan writes “I wrote this song to remind myself that even though things are hard you will meet those people who stick around eventually.” Even though people come and go in your world, remembering that there will be lots of cries and laughs on your journey to finding those people who see you for who you are. The main hook stating: ‘it takes a lot of goodbyes to get to forever. Lujan is set to tour Germany, Austria, and Switzerland again fall 2024.

LIVE AT THE SOU’WESTER LODGE

Bird & Willow

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Bird & Willow: Presented by Sou’wester Arts

Born into a large musical family at the intersection of Bird Avenue and Willow Street, Shiloh and Jared started to write songs in their teens in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Inspired by 90s soft rock as well as folk duo acts like The Weepies and the Oh Hellos, the songs took shape around Jared’s multi-instrumental arranging abilities and Shiloh’s penchant for melodic storytelling and wordsmithing.

Bird and Willow cut their teeth on the indie circuit in San Jose, CA, playing everywhere from unplugged house shows to local street festivals which attracted thousands. Before long they were opening up for touring stops in San Francisco, supporting some of their favorite songwriters like Zach Winters, Tyson Motsenbocker, and Mike Edel, as well as bands such as Sherwood and The Collection.

Shiloh and Jared have now each made a home in the Pacific Northwest, and have been caught up in the thriving Portland music scene. On their most recent release, More Awake Now, the core threads of story-songs drenched in larger meaning have been joined with dreamy guitars, orchestral strings, and the lush production of Justin Kawashima.

Girlgoyle: Presented by Sou’wester Arts

Girlgoyle is a band based in Portland, Oregon. Their sound and songs are inspired by longing for and loving the desert, softness and the opposite, and Land of Talk. 

Saroon: Presented by Sou’wester Arts

Saroon is the genre-fluid creative outlet for the prolific multi-instrumentalist producer/composer ayal.  The project is founded on the idea that genuine self expression can act as a beacon for others to relate, and actualize themselves.  Over the last year Saroon has released diverse albums such as Gilgul, a piano based instrumental album that describes the process of reincarnation starting at the moment of death and ending at conception; ODDDITTIES VOL.1, an electro-pop album comprised of a collection of songs written for his songwriting podcast Honest Jams; and Dive 1, a collaborative ambient album in which ayal collaborated with members of Bathysphere records who made improvised beds of synths on which ayal recorded clarinet arrangements.  Through the music, ayal attempts to express the breadth of experience, from existential grief, to the silliest relief, to the hearts of the vulnerable, and the first cat in space, and what it means to live the lives, and the deepest connection, and waffles.

Live Music: Chief Ahamefule J. Oluo

6/8. 8p. FREE

Chief Ahamefule J. Oluo (he/they/them) is a Nigerian-American multi-instrumentalist, composer, writer, comedian, and creator of live performance and theater. They were a founding member of the award-winning experimental jazz quartet Industrial Revelation, a Mellon Creative Research Fellow, a Creative Capital awardee, an ArtistTrust Arts Innovators award recipient, and a semi-finalist in NBC’s Stand Up for Diversity comedy competition. Oluo co-produced comedian Hari Kondabolu’s Waiting for 2042 and Mainstream American Comic for Kill Rock Stars, and the album Who the Hell is Dwayne Kennedy? by the eponymous stand-up legend. They premiered two autobiographical music-based performances at The Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival: Now I’m Fine (2016), which the New York Times described as “a New Orleans funeral march orchestrated by Arnold Schoenberg,” and of which Time Out New York said, “A day later, it’s as though I grabbed a live wire; I can still feel the electricity in my skin”; and Susan (2020), which Brantley called “virtuosic” and “crackerjack.” Oluo has written for television, including the stop-motion animated comedy Santa Inc.on HBO Max, starring Sarah Silverman and Seth Rogen. They have also appeared on This American Life. Now I’m Fine was adapted into the film Thin Skin, starring Oluo, who also wrote the score and co-wrote the script. Thin Skin won Best Director at the Harlem Film Festival. Oluo’s work has been commissioned, presented, or invited by On the Boards, PICA, the Meany Center, the Clarice, Seattle Theater Group, and REDCAT.

Nick Delffs: Presented by Sou’wester Arts

Nick Delffs grew up in Mendocino County, a lawless stretch of coastline that’s hard to get to and, for many, hard to escape. Nick did — emerging in the early aughts as the frontman for Portland band The Shaky Hands, whose sharp, jittery rock was anchored by Nick’s quavering vocals and questing lyrics. The Shaky Hands were mainstays of Portland on the verge of a major shift, and they rode that shift a while, signing to Kill Rock Stars and touring internationally with some of the bigger names in indie rock. But a hiatus in 2011 became indefinite and Nick Delffs was once again cast into the world: working as a sideman, releasing solo records, doing manual labor, going deeper into his spiritual practices, and, crucially, becoming a father.

Becoming a parent can affect different artists in different ways. Nick rode that change with surpassing grace and maturity. 2017’s Redesign, his first full-length under his own name, reflected the transition. In “Song for Aja”, Nick touched on other concerns familiar to those who follow his work: love of the natural world; longing for spiritual and physical connection; the desire to suffer with meaning and exult with abandon, to embrace somehow the world in its maddening contradictions and find the unity at the core.

Childhood Pastimes, his second release on Mama Bird Recording Co., is both more focused and, despite being technically an EP, more ambitious. It’s a four-song cycle — one song with many movements or four songs that bleed into one another, depending on how you hear it — that can be viewed either as a personal journey or an archetypal passage of a human being through four discrete stages: roughly, the movement from childhood innocence into adolescent adventure (The Escape); the sudden immersion into a life of discovery and excitement (The Dream); the first experience of romantic love, followed by the onset of heartbreak, dissolution, breakdown of self (The Affair); the emergence into a new way of thinking, a fresh perspective that encompasses all the suffering and joy into a balanced whole (The Outside).

Nick plays nearly all of the instruments here and the result is a unified aesthetic, born ultimately of his deep-seated love of rhythm: the thrum and throb of the acoustic guitars, the percussive melodic bang of the elegantly-crafted piano lines, and always, always the insistent, driving drums, propelling the record, and the listener, on this journey as the four tracks bleed into one another, one body, one blood, one beating heart. The concept of four songs that are really one suite of music requires a sure hand, and Nick’s never shakes: the way the songs blend together while retaining their distinctiveness — from the poppy exaltation of “The Escape” to the cold intensity, almost like an acoustic Kraftwerk, of “The Affair” — shows a songwriter and musician who has fully grown into his powers.

Those who have followed Nick’s career may see this as a culmination of years and years of honing and fine-tuning his bountiful gifts, and wonder with delight what might come next. For those who haven’t listened to Nick before, Childhood Pastimes is the perfect entry point, a distillation of what’s come before and the promise of a new beginning.

Live Music: Generifus

6/29. 8. FREE

Lê Almeida & Melanie Radford: Presented by Sou’wester Arts

Live Music: Lindsay Clark and Half Shadow

7/20. 8p. Free

Lindsay Clark:

Lindsay Clark finds balance between traditional folk, English folk, country and her own version of experimental folk that seems to come from within. With influences ranging from the Beach Boys, Elizabeth Cotton, Joni Mitchell, Appalachian folk, her classical upbringing and her father’s record collection, she blends many worlds into a uniquely warm sound. She has carved out a unique and vibrant place as an artist with her penchant for poetry, rich harmony and a style of self-taught fingerpicking influenced by Nick Drake, John Fahey, and others.

Originally from the small gold rush town of Nevada City, CA, she now resides in Portland, OR. She has shared the stage with musicians such as Alela Diane, Adam Torres, Nat Baldwin (Dirty Projectors), Ryan Francesconi (Joanna Newsom), Jolie Holland, and Michael Hurley. Her sound has been described as “folk with angelic vocals washing over smooth edges” (1859 Magazine), with her recent album Carpe Noctem called “stunning” by NPR Music. The album features William Tyler, Alela Diane, Sage Fisher (Dolphin Midwives), & Andy Rayborn (Paper Gates) and was engineered, co-produced, co-arranged with Jeremy Harris (Fruit Bats / Hand Habits). She has also recently contributed to Michael Hurley’s latest release, Time of the Foxgloves.

Half Shadow:

For the past decade Half Shadow, the midnight-blue songwriting moniker of Portland’s Jesse Carsten, has been unfurling an enigmatic, windswept music: equal parts earthen folk and cosmic rock and roll, with a primal pop experimentalism seeping from the edges. Wedding an expansive, transcendent poetics to a fiercely home-spun aesthetic, Carsten creates joyful, eclectic song-collages that embrace the experimental singer-songwriter tradition of the Pacific Northwest while enfolding an array of canonical art-voicings; songs range from abstract finger-picked poems to heart-tugged acapella treaties and repetitive art-rock incantations. Half Shadow’s performances are recognized as deep feeling, immersive events. The Portland Mercury has praised Carsten’s shows as “invariably powerful, full of wonder, and unlike anything else.”

Following a steady string of homemade cassettes, CD-Rs, and digital one-off releases, Carsten birthed the first fully formed Half Shadow LP in 2019, Dream Weather Its Electric Song, which was hailed by Antiquated Future as “a carefully thought-out work…of poetic devotionals to the natural world, the subconscious, other realms.” The record was celebrated for its ability to work tangible magic. As Queen City Sounds put it, Dream Weather deconstructs “familiar songwriting styles, bringing the logical mind into alternate pathways of operating.” Following Dream Weather, on which Half Shadow toured in late 2019, and which after followed the world-crashing pandemic, Carsten released At Home With My Candles (Bud Tapes/Dove Cove Records), an album of mythopoetic paeans to the domestic uncanny, the mysterious and unseen worlds experienced at home. Expanding the project’s intimate poetics into something more sonically encompassing, Carsten conjured intimate folk song epics, lo-fi dirges, and primal pop experiments that effectively connect the domestic and the cosmic, the ordinary and the surreal. The album displays, according to Various Small Flames, “an uncanny marriage between personal insight and a wider mystical experience” and was celebrated by a small but fervent cadre of international listeners in the know.

Carsten’s non-linear and environmental dream-lyrics place him in the company of like-minded contemporaries such as Mega Bog’s Erin Birgy, Yves Jarvis, and Ruth Garbus, for whom songwriting is an attempt at surreal levels of poetic feeling. Having been called “one of Portland’s best kept secrets,” it is paradoxically Half Shadow’s mystery-inspired, DIY ethos that spirits Carsten’s ever-evolving project out of the home-recordist’s cave and onto more illuminated stages. When it does, Half Shadow is ready to wrap listeners in the dark, sparkling hues and mossy undergrowth that have become the poetic trademark of this singular undertaking.