When: 8pm on Saturday 17 May 2014
Where: Royal Northern College of Music, 124 Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9RD
We’re delighted to be working with S. Carey for the first time.
S. Carey’s chosen musical expression is a hugely beatific, restorative panorama of beauty – perfect given how landscape and the wonder of nature inspire much of Carey’s imagery. His new album, Range of Light – the follow-up to his 2010 debut All We Grow – takes its title from the name that 19th Century naturalist John Muir – Carey’s hero – gave to California’s Sierra Nevada, and follows suit with a dazzling array of musical light and shade, drawn from Carey’s love of jazz, modern classical and Americana. Like a weathered mountain range changing shadow form and colour, or the ebb and flow of a river’s current, his music is simultaneously restful and rhythmic, complex and simple, and always evolving.
While he studied classical percussion and piano at the University of Wisconsin in Eau Claire, Carey imbibed rhythmic minimalists such as Steve Reich and Philip Glass. Immediately after graduating in 2007, he caught wind that Eau Claire resident Justin Vernon was forming a band to take his For Emma, Forever Ago opus on the road. Carey learnt the drum and vocal parts for the album, rehearsed with Vernon, and has been a mainstay of the Bon Iver live band ever since.
While on tour with Bon Iver, Carey developed his own song writing ambitions, and after many less than frequent recording sessions between tours, released All We Grow in 2010. Those nine songs sat between a folk/modern classical hybrid and rarefied jazz climes. Carey’s warm melodic nuances, reflected in the lush folds of his singing, added to the mutable percussive syncopations of his instrumentation.
Range of Light incorporates elements of his previous work, but also amplifies Carey’s percussive proclivities, and is altogether more developed than its predecessors, with more input on the performance and even composition side from the band of musicians and best friends he assembled originally to bring All We Grow to life in the live setting.
Tour support comes from Nottingham’s Rue Royale – aka. Brookln and Ruth Dekker.
This show is a co-promotion with DHP.
Tickets are available from the RNCM box office (no booking fee), RNCM.ac.uk, Seetickets.com, Ticketline.co.uk and on 0161 907 5555.