tUnE - YaRdS

Sunday 14th February 2010

Captains Rest, Glasgow

Over 18s only

When you talk about lo-fi more or less inspired by folk, the best stuff always carries with it a sense of discovery. Cheap and tinny acoustic music should feel like something you stumbled upon, like maybe you dug it out of an old drawer or rescued it from the freebee bin in the thrift store. And then the force of the music should sparkle through the grit and hiss and distortion and make you think you understand something about the person making it. It's a romantic notion, one not necessarily based in reality. But the best music in this vein manages to convey a sense of intimacy, as if it's a one-to-one conversation between the artist and the listener.

That's how BiRd-BrAiNs feels. It's the debut album by Merrill Garbus' tUnE-yArDs (she's the lone member of the band) and it was recorded on a digital voice recorder and assembled using shareware mixing software. Garbus' primary instrument is ukulele, the tone of which is thin and trebly and lonesome, the sound you usually get from a barrel-scraping demos collection issued long after someone is dead. To this she adds her own field recordings-- the sound outside her window, a child being asked about blueberries, indistinct creaks and clatter-- along with occasional percussion that seems to consist of whatever nearby could be smacked or shaken. Some songs loop these elements into mini-epics that bring to mind an early, crude version of Juana Molina's one-woman-band aesthetic; others sound like they're being whispered around a late-night campfire burning a few tents over.

www.myspace.com/tuneyards
tune-yards.com

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