Begun as a weekly residency at Brooklyn’s Manhattan Inn during the summer of 2013, Adam Schatz & Friends is an event where new music is tried for the first time, where other people’s songs are rearranged and explored, and where the family of amazing musicians Adam Schatz has come to call his close friends can gather and unleash a dynamic performance that feels inclusive to every person in the room. A counterpart to Schatz’s acclaimed bands Landlady and Father Figures and an extension of his pursuit of improvisation (both as a performer and organizer), the format of Adam Schatz & Friends is fluid and, by design, entirely different every time a show happens. In the crystal ball for May 3: the premiere of a handful of brand new Landlady songs, reinterpretations of Harry Belafonte and the Kinks, improvisations, and more.
 
Landladyland official site
Landladyland on Soundcloud

Zula official site | Zula on Facebook | Zula on Bandcamp

Brooklyn’s Zula plays hypnotic, groovy pop music with a dose of noise and psychedelia. Their debut, This Hopeful, caught listeners’ attention with its personal voice and propulsive, expansive production. On Zula’s latest album, Grasshopper, out now via Inflated Records, cousins Henry and Nate Terepka craft songs with reflective, suspended moods, over a heavily rhythmic sound. Grasshopper navigates many different territories – the band foregrounds texture, but has a singer-songwriter orientation; the album pulls from dance music, post-punk and art rock, but resists stereotypes. Both funky and introspective, Zula’s music hovers invitingly for the curious listener.

The songs on Grasshopper, which were produced by Henry and Nate and mixed by Jake Aron (tUnE-yArDs, Jamie Lidell), combine wildly processed sounds with welcoming detail. Engineered by Jonathan Low (Miner Street Recordings, Philadelphia) and Kevin Harper (Warner Brothers Studios, Nashville), the longtime collaborators manipulated live band performances, adding layers and treatments. Emotive vocal harmonies were tempered with an effected, unnatural grit. The production has a re-sampled 70’s-90’s influence, informed by an acoustic guitar strumming along to a mangled James Brown loop.

Zula has built a strong reputation performing in DIY spaces across the city and country. In a live setting, the four-piece opens up their tracks, allowing them to breathe and take off on unexpected tangents. Propelled by energetic, elastic grooves, Zula is known for a polished show that sounds a little different each time.

“To listen to a Zula track is to get lost in a world of the band’s own creation — a groovy, hypnotic space in which the answers to difficult questions start to become clearer as the bass pounds against your chest and the rhythmic percussion propels you forward.”
– Consequence of Sound

“New York psych-pop explorers Zula aren’t easy to pin down, but while their sound shifts track to track, there is a beautiful coherence to an album like This Hopeful.”
– SPIN

“Pointillistic structures with a mainspring of Minimalism.”
– Jon Pareles, The New York Times

Palm is four-piece band from upstate New York. Founded as a trio in 2011, the first songs were all instrumental and focused on the interplay between Kasra Sarikhani and Eve Alpert’s thick, mechanical guitar parts against Hugo Stanley’s sparse, loose drum phrases. The band has refined its sound over the last few years with the addition of Gerasimos Livitsanos on bass, but retains a compositional focus on detail, density, and heaviness. The songs are experiments that playfully handle aspects of music you might recognize, with a palette of sound informed by punk, metal and noise as well as jazz, bossa nova, etc. Palm trashes the listeners expectations with moments of dissonance that are reigned in and precise; by comparison the pretty moments are often where the chaos is. Amid these constant and rapid changes, the band sneaks in a deeper unrelenting repetition. The contradiction makes sense.

Palm on Facebook
Palm on Bandcamp
Palm on Oh My Rockness

“This is the part of the song when we come together,” Adam Schatz’s voice rings out. “There’s no before. There’s no after. There’s only this.” Schatz leads Landlady, the Brooklyn five-piece whose 2014 Hometapes debut, Upright Behavior, boldly disrupts the notion of genre and reveals the soulful and continually-resonating work of Schatz and core band members Ian Chang, Ian McLellan Davis, Booker Stardrum, and Will Graefe, as well as a cast of NYC-based contributors gathered from Schatz’s tandem walks of life as a solo musician, improviser, organizer, collaborator, promoter, and writer. Compared to rock and roll juggernauts like The Band and Talking Heads, Landlady merge vast skill, a bend toward experimentation, and a proven belief that songs can be a true extension of the human experience. The result is timeless and charted by their recorded works and transformative live shows — both critically-acclaimed and ever-evolving. Landlady released a new EP, Heat, this summer, in tandem with nationwide tours with Son Lux and Buke and Gase.