SHEDDING

AGENT:  MATTHEW

AVAILABILITY: SEE AVAILS / UPCOMING SHOWS

TOOLS: MAKE AN OFFER / PROMO MATERIALS

BAND SITES:  OFFICIAL BAND WEBSITE / FACEBOOK PAGE

LABEL: HOMETAPES (US) / OCIO (US)

FREE MP3: GB

HOMETOWN:  Louisville, KY

DISCOGRAPHY:

2007 - DEAD IN THE WATER EP

2007 - BRAINCRUST EP

2006 - WHAT GOD DOESN'T BLESS, YOU

WON'T LOVE, WHAT YOU DON'T LOVE, THE

CHILD WON'T KNOW CD/LP

2004 - HELLO ST. LOUIS CD

2003 - NOW I'M SHEDDING LP

BIO:

Shedding was Connor Bell, at least that's the way it had been for the better part of a decade.  That was until Bell made a definitive move away from the hermetically sealed confines of his sample-collage / electro-acoustic soundscapes back towards more extroverted forms of expression.  For these ends he conscripted Louisville underground rock stalwarts Tim Furnish and Joey Yates, themselves having emanated from the arcane climes of combos like Crain, Parlour, and Sapat.

Shedding has become a band, leaving behind its intangible chrysalis to emerge a full-blooded, flesh and bone concern.  They trade in the angularity that blossomed in the late seventies and came to fruition in the mid-nineties.  They aspire to the Motorik pulse that drove Teutonic progressive, but feel just as comfortable trolling around in the cannabis-infused primordial drone-grooves espoused by some adherents of the Canterbury school of lysergically enhanced musical experimentation.

Shedding evokes contrasting textures and imagery.  Like some of their spiritual brethren from Sheffield, they conjure visions of concrete structures and the vast onslaught of metallic scaffolding it takes to erect them.  Unlike their British soul brothers, Shedding will impart an occasional pastoral flourish as if to suggest that some form of untrammeled nature might still stand beyond the urbanized grey perimeter.

Bell's background as a historian has led him to repeatedly compare modern cultures to those of bygone eras.  Through that lens it can seem as though not much has changed.  It is possible that Shedding exists to present a version of what the future might hold.  Whether this is an optimistic forecast or otherwise is difficult to pinpoint.  Perhaps the ambiguities are too nuanced and better left up to the individual beholder to decide.

Let us not forget, after all, that Shedding is a process of sloughing off.  A chance anew to burn off old impurities, and thereby to purify the words' works of statically-inclined tribal minds.

REVIEWS:

The ghostly aura of birdsong fuse, teetering at the edge of becoming a symphonic field recording.

-The Wire

An often stunning, if somewhat challenging, collage of avant-garde, decontextualized "micro-sampled" jazz.

-Gorilla Vs. Bear

Ostensibly a tribute to Eric Dolphy, this is actually a fairly good conflation of electronics, noodling, esoterica, peripheral prog, and ambient wrought by a guy who, following a rabid immersion in the famed saxist's histrionic blowing, read a snippet of an interview in DownBeat and experience some kind of kensho, uplevelling his consciousness. Dolphy does tend to have that effect.

-Signal To Noise

So there are drones and then there are drones, mesmerizing drones. And clarinet trills? Clarinet trills. Oboes and flutes.  Chirps, trills, and twitters. Flutes as birds: an avian communication. What God Doesn't Bless contains three long avant-garde tracks of eerie clairvoyance and ornithological translations.

-Skyscraper

A strange sort of jazz drone collage constructed from samples of Dolphy records, field recordings and some added percussion, well, it's almost like they came to us and asked us what sort of record we wanted to hear, and we told them "Let's see, drones for sure, some field recordings, and heck, why not include some Dolphy..."  The jazz element is subtle and quite minimal, but as a chunk of dreamy dark drone drift, it's really quite fantastic. And as far as we're concerned there can never be too much tribute paid to the late great Eric Dolphy!

-Aquarius Records

Understated delight that will soothe and relax you as it floats through the air.

-Terrascope

It's the sort of music that practically dates you not to allow your imagination to go into overload; humanoid confectionary, beautiful lost girls, evil witches and wizards, oversized vegetation, kindly old men with no ulterior motives - it's all far fetched but quite, quite endearing.

-Boomkat

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