The Black Ryder, Young Prisms, Matt Baldwin

The Black Ryder
The Black Ryder is essentially a collaboration between Australian artists Aimee Nash & Scott Von Ryper. Their debut album ‘Buy The Ticket, Take the Ride’ was released through Brooklyn-based Mexican Summer in the USA in September 2010, EMI Music / The Anti-Machine Machine in Australia, & Vinyl Junkie in Japan. Their album & live shows have featured various special guests + friends (including members of Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, The Brian Jonestown Massacre + Swervedriver). To date,… Show more the band have toured + played shows with Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, The Brian Jonestown Massacre, The Cult, The Raveonettes, The Charlatans, Spectrum (Pete Kember of Spacemen 3), Broken Social Scene, Tamaryn, 5th Annual Clean Air Clear Stars Festival (Pioneertown, USA) + Austin Pysch Fest 2011. Nash + Von Ryper wrote, engineered + produced the album themselves at their home studio. Rolling Stone Magazine in Australia nominated them as Best New Artist in 2010 & also included the album in Top 50 Albums of the Year. The Black Ryder relocated to Los Angeles in September 2010 where they are currently based. They are currently working on their second album as well as other soundtrack / film scoring projects. Nash The duo recently teamed up with Iconic Australian Jewelry designers MANIAMANIA for 3 musical visual collaborations. 3 films (featuring international supermodel Abbey Lee Kershaw) were launched on the New York Times website, followed by numerous other high profile fashion + lifestyle sites + blogs.

Young Prisms
If 'slacker' means 'purveyor of angst-ridden badass psychedelic rock,' then the Young Prisms qualify. Five such slackers comprise this band: Jason Hendardy, Jordan Silbert, Matt Allen, Stef Hodapp, and Gio Betteo. Silbert is the old man, at twenty-four, and all five recently dropped out of various unsatisfying academic situations—Hendardy from a media arts program at California College of the Arts, Jordan from a behavior analysis master's track in Fresno, and Stef, Matt, and Gio from a Bay Area community college. What they did instead is they moved into a roach infested apartment in San Francisco's Mission District and started pumping out dark, driving rhythms overlaid with melodies that pulse and build and then break over you. It's some of the best stuff coming out of a city exploding with brilliant new music. The group's lyrics are laced with a kind of nonchalance (I'm thinking of one song off the new LP called "If You Want To," as in "whatevs") that devolves quickly into a grim, passionate poetry part My Bloody Valentine, part Sonic Youth, part Charles Bukowski, part some kind of uncategorizable sparkly ecstasy. Whoa. So consider this a warning issued with an inviting grin: this music will make you want to drop acid and become a recluse. Or it will make you even less excited to work your s~~tty day job. Or it will make you jump up and down in a dark crowded room while your eardrums bleed. Or it will make you feel something secret like happiness, minus any sentimental whimsicality. Or it will make you want to read Sarte, or graphic comic books, or maybe Hunter Thompson. And in one hundred years when people want to know what it felt like to be young on the West Coast in the early new millennium, they might just put on this record, by these rising kings (and queen) of Psychedelic Slackerdom.

Matt Baldwin
Matt Baldwin is an exceedingly talented acoustic guitarist with his haunting, intoxicating solo debut. He is the visionary wildcard of today's solo guitar music, the ambitious fever dreamer, the serpent in the grass. He is featured on Tompkins Square's 2006 Berkeley Guitar LP. He covers Krautrock legends Neu! 'Weissensee',Metal Vikings, Judas Priest 'Winter', and he culls inspiration from Prog heroes,Yes, on the closing epic 'Rainbow'. His music comes on like a creeping moss, verdant but threatening, comforting yet unsettling. Matt Baldwin, raised in California's rustic Pacific Grove, educated in the alternative mecca of Berkeley, sits in the center of this quiet, swirling scene. Towering tall with long blonde locks, he conjures from his axe dark and mystical realms. He calls his music 'New Age', and he may not be joking. In Matt's work, his role as interpreter is just as crucial as his role as originator. His bold 10-minute cover of Neu's 'Weissensee' and his epic dobro-driven and feedback-overloaded version of Judas Priest's 'Winter' from Paths of Ignition were game changers for a man that felt stifled by association with the solo-guitar purists. On Night in the Triangle, Matt once again expands on the visions of his forebears with daring treatments of songs by The Durutti Column and Conrad Schnitzler. The visionary wildcard of today's solo guitar music scene, Matt continues to make music that is at once verdant and threatening, comforting yet unsettling. To quote Cope once again, "this so-called folkie Matt Baldwin druid is nothing less than a one-man Heavy Metal Band!...Brothers'n'sisters, it's f~~king heroic. These Great Fists of Matt make Ben Chasny sound like Marge Proops in comparison."

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