Nat Baldwin
The simple combination of Baldwin's bass and singing is pure, direct, and timeless.

Today, when most of the so-called musical innovators simply offer contemporary takes on already proven and accepted movements in music (neo-psychedelia, nth-wave garage bands...) Portsmouth, New Hampshire's Nat Baldwin is a true original. Baldwin is an upright bass player and a singer, but he takes both of those things to their limit, and has perfected a sound that he can call entirely his own.

Nat is currently touring with Dirty Projectors and with a new Orange ad (in the UK) featuring "Only In My Dreams" from his Lights Out CD EP it looks like the world is starting to give Mr. Baldwin the attention he deserves.

Alexis had been collecting stories and images as he moved from Paris, where he was born, to a seemingly endless series of towns big and small across the US. As he wandered through the record bins at various music shops across the land he began to realize that the records he was looking for were ones he would have to make himself. Ending up in Portsmouth, NH, Alexis settled in to make the music that he had been dreaming of and to fill his songs with the stories he had been collecting. Soon, he would have a batch of songs that represented a whole swath of American life that was being neglected in song.

Testface
Testface , the brainchild of David Snider, hails from central Oregon, via years of winters in the cold woods of New Hampshire. Almost a decade of woodsheding and selectively chiseling out songs in the shadows produced this years "doctor won't you get us to dawn." For this release he has harbored an arsenal of trusted friends, accomplices and academic monsters to create a suprisingly different kind of album. Parts psychedelic, parts experimental Americana, the songs are spacious and lonesome with a deep yearning for solace. Testface is poignant, wounded and endlessly searching.

From an early age MR. Snider was exposed to the grave hymnal stanzas of his local church on Sunday mornings -- the quirky accordian playing of his eccentric Swedish mother and the solemn dark madrigals of his German composer father. His first full-length, "What To Cut," was self-released in 1998. This bare-bones and haunting treasure has slowly received tremendous underground acclaim.

The first album, New Mother, was released in 1999. Next came How I Loved You, released in 2001. Then, Everything Is Good Hear/Please Come Home was released in 2003. The album The Angels Of Light Sing ‘Other People’ is available as of March 14, 2005.

Gira says:

"I write the songs on acoustic guitar, then gather musicians and friends, and build up the orchestrations with them in the studio and in live performances. I guide the process, but solicit their creative contributions actively. Each recording contains the contributions of an ever-changing plethora of amazing musicians, whom I thank here heartily! After many years (too many to comfortably contemplate!) of dwelling on “sonic overload” with Swans, I now concentrate on augmenting the songs I write with orchestrations that support the basic song, rather than the sound itself taking over."