Phil Elverum is Mount Eerie. The 30 year-old multi-instrumentalist has played in other bands, and worked as a producer, but remains best known for this solo project, which began under the name the Microphones in 1997. In 2003, he renamed the project Mount Eerie (and added an “e” to his last name, Elvrum) after returning from a trip to Norway, where he lived alone in a remote cabin for a winter. “Mount Eerie” specifically refers to the mountain on Fidalgo Island, an island an hour and change north of Seattle where you’ll also find Elverum’s lifelong Anacortes, Washington hometown.

To date, his most critically acclaimed (and popular) album is the Microphones’ 2001 epic The Glow Pt. 2. The first official Mount Eerie album—following the Microphones’ final 2003 full-length, also called Mount Eerie—is 2005’s No Flashlight: Songs of the Fulfilled Night. It was followed by 2007’s Mount Eerie pts. 6 & 7, a 132-page, hardcover book of his photography, packaged with a 10” picture disk. In early 2009, the journals he kept and drawings he scribbled in Norway were released as a 144-page hardcover book called Dawn. It came with 16 color photo cards and a CD of songs he wrote while living in the cabin.

Regardless of the moniker, the various collections include interlocking themes, references to earlier works, and are marked by Elverum’s distinctive naturalist self-recorded lo-fi analog sound that mixes a whispered, gentle voice, which can also yell and bellow, with various strains of sound: His work can be delicately spare or booming and ambitiously layered and noisy, often in the same song. Lyrically, he focuses on memory, first-person storytelling, myth, naturalism, the everyday as sacred, and a sense of place (in and out of Washington State), among other related things. In addition to his extravagantly packaged albums, Elverum has released self-published books (which he illustrates or fills with his photographs) via his own label, P.W. Elverum & Sun, Ltd

Mount Eerie's newest album is Wind's Poem.

Interview with Mount Eerie in Village Voince

The work of TJO has always innately crossed genres and boundaries- like several genies emerging from a single lamp. Every singer wants to be a painter, every guitarist a singer, every songwriter a poet and every producer an alchemist or at least an author.

Tjo is skilled at all these things, and for her 5th album she has wielded all of her powers. She has made a song cycle, generous and concise, direct and uncompromising.

TJO’s new LP is primarily the offering of a singer-songwriter, but there is an elegant attention to detail in the mix that will please all those in need of the great headphone jams, and there is plenty of electronic minimalist drone magic, and heroic adventure too. But A Ways Awayis driven by the singer and the songs. On this record, she has put her voice out front, and as in the past, the vocals are perversely and meticulously arranged and gorgeously sung. There’s compassion and concern, wisdom and heartbreak, moving on and waking up in these songs. The elements of her live show and her studio craft meet here. There’s some sorcery and exorcism, and there are questions that stand on their own.

As a dream is surprising and mysterious, so can be her live shows, haunting, masterful, arresting. Her ability to divine the finest players in any town to create shifting and often spontaneous bands makes each show unique, a thing of legend. TJO conjures up all of your favorite singer-songwriters, painters and poets as if they are all there in her songs, a dialogic meeting in the air. It is an expansive and dynamic mystery sound. There is space in it, there is volume and electricity in it, and there is no fear. ONeil coaxes gamelan sonorities or tiny gongs out of her guitar, thick dissonant tone clusters or rapid fingerpicking to support her mellifluous call. At some point Tara tosses shakers, bells, and tambourines at the crowd and before they know it the audience members have become The Ecstatic Tambourine Orchestra. No longer are they just watching the band—the room and everyone in it are the band. It’s complicated, but also profoundly simple. Through layered veils of guitar and the constant companions of distant tambourines, she gently draws out the creatures of all of our inner worlds.

While writing her own music, Tara Jane ONeil has also collaborated with Papa M, Ida, Mirah, Michael Hurley, Jackie-O Motherfucker, and the King Cobra, among others; has scored soundtracks for film and theater; and records instrumental music under the moniker Strange Clouds. She was a founding member of some influential and prescient bands back in the day, like Rodan, Retsin, and the Sonora Pine. ONeil is also an accomplished visual artist whose paintings and drawings have exhibited worldwide; Wings. Strings. Meridians. A Blighted Bestiary, her second book of paintings to appear in the last decade, was published by Yeti last year. TJO has been celebrated for her visionary art and music by folks from The Wire and Pitchfork and the New York Times to curators of multidisciplinary art events and music festivals.

TJO will be practicing her meticulous extrapolation, her ecstatic melody, her sorcery, in locations all over the globe in 2009. In May she starts in Europe and moves slowly westward.

No Kids is a Canadian indie pop band. Based in Vancouver, the band was formed by Justin Kellam, Julia Chirka and Nick Krgovich following the departure of Larissa Loyva from their earlier band P:ano.

The band's debut album, Come Into My House, was released February 19, 2008 on Tomlab.

Russian-Israeli pianist Dina Pruzhansky started her music studies at the age of six. At the same time, she began composing her first works. After winning a nationwide piano competition in her native Azerbaijan while still in her early teens, she immigrated to Israel.

She has appeared in solo and chamber music recitals throughout Israel, Russia, Belgium, Germany and the United States, and has shared the stage with many leading artists, including the soloists of the New Israeli Opera and members of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. Since her arrival in the United States in the fall of 2006, she has been residing in NYC, and has been featured in numerous performances in NYC concert venues, including the Union Club, Steinway Hall, the Yamaha Piano Salon, Scandinavia House, The Ukrainian Institute, the Russian Permanent Mission to the U.N. and others.

Classical and musical theater works written by Dina Pruzhansky have been performed at major halls in Israel, such as the Jerusalem Music Academy and the Blumenthal Music Hall in Tel Aviv. Her art songs were selected for the Russian Cultural Heritage Festival 2007 in New York. Her reed organ pieces, commissioned by Artis Wodehouse, were also premiered in NYC. Israeli Radio has broadcast Ms. Pruzhansky’s works, where she was also featured in numerous interviews. She is a composer at the BMI Lehman Engel Advanced Musical Theater Workshop, where her current projects include a musical adaptation of Mike Leigh’s film “Secrets and Lies”.

Ms. Pruzhansky holds a Masters Degree (Summa cum Laude) in Piano Performance from the Tel-Aviv Buchmann-Mehta School of Music, where she studied with Prof. Victor Derevianko, a former pupil of Heinrich Neuhaus. Her wide-ranging interests also led her to earn a degree in Art History.