The trio Les Poules will be the honored guests for the second edition of the Rencontres de musiques spontanées (RMS2), to be held in Rimouski from June 2 to 10, 2006. This will also be the occasion for the group P.O.W.E.R. to officially launch their album Tomahawk Territory.

The Sound Symposium Committee (Newfoundland and Labrador) selected Joane Hétu as recipient of the 2006 Freddie Stone Award. The award is granted annually to a notable figure of Canadia’s creative music scene.

The Eastern Stars are New Yorkers Rob Corradetti and Kaia Wong and their debut album July 5th, 1961 was recorded in the basement of Rob’s Brooklyn apartment on an 8-track as the duo took time off from their other band, Mixel Pixel.

Upon hearing the soft, circular guitar pricks and sleek strings of the first track, They Know What To Do, one could easily conclude that July 5th, 1961 is your typical modern day folk album, but delve further into the album’s 11 tracks and you’ll discover a slightly psychedelic wonderland filled with fuzzy guitars and slow, intimate, almost always beautiful melodies.

The duo that comprises The Eastern Stars obviously appreciates the male/female vocal dynamic because Wong and Corradetti share lead vocals on a majority of the tracks. A problem arises, however, in that neither of their voices is all that original or engaging. So much so, in fact, that if either Corradetti or Wong handled the vocal duties along a very numbing experience would result.

Curiously enough, this exact thing happens twice on the album. Wong is lone vocalist on The Diamonds In Your Eyes, and it turns out better than I thought it would. Her vocals are manipulated to give the impression that a duo of Kaia Wong’s are singing all the while backed by jangly guitars. The result is something fairly beautiful. The second instance where this occurs fairs a little less well, if only because this time Corradetti shares the vocal duties with himself and his voice is the less interesting of the two. Luckily, the beautiful music backing his voice lifts I Fear The Love (I Will). Its up-tempo beat and springtime violins evoke sunshiny feelings in the listener and at a minute and 50 seconds it’s hardly a criminal act.

Musically there aren’t many missteps on the album as keyboards, strings, percussion and other instruments are added and subtracted throughout with a keen sense of construct. Regardless of how emotionless the duo’s voices are, it’s hard to imagine a pair of voices better suited to the music.

Nothing worldly important happened on July 5th, 1961, but as the press info on The Eastern Stars webpage put it: it’s “a date on which everything imaginable happened: birth, death, tragedy, baseball, and slugging back to work with Holiday hangovers.” July 5th, 1961 may only be 11 tracks that stretch to a miniscule 30 minutes, but somehow Rob Corradetti and Kaia Wong have managed to ooze that sensibility. There’s nothing flooringly amazing on this album, but like birth, death, tragedy, baseball… it happens, and it’ll matter to someone.

Until June 1, 2006, DAME invites you to its great May sale. Firstly, a 10% discount is offered on all CDs from the Les disques Victo label. But that’s not all, a generous 25% discount is also offered on the following titles:

• Pierre Cartier, Les fleurs du tapis
• Pierre Cartier, Chansons de Douve
• Pierre Cartier, «Dis, Blaise…» chanson du Transsibérien
• {nbio:bailey_de} {nbio:berthiaume_an} {nbio:frith_fr}, Soshin
• Paul Dutton, Oralizations
• {nbio:tetreault_ma} {nbio:otomo_yo}, 2. Tok
• {nbio:tetreault_ma} {nbio:otomo_yo}, 3. Ahhh
• {nbio:berthiaume_an} {nbio:sirjacq_qu} {nbio:teale_no}, Leaves and Snows
• Taxonomy, A Global Taxonomical Machine
• Michel F Côté, Flat fourgonnette (Mescal Free Style)
• Antenata, AnteNata
• Tim Brady, Three Cities in the Life of Dr Norman Bethune
• Danielle Palardy Roger, Bruiducœur, prières des infidèles
• {nbio:boyko_db} {nbio:duncan_ch} {nbio:martin_je}, Idiolalla
• Pierre-Yves Martel, Engagement & Confrontation
• {nbio:berthiaume_an} {nbio:donato_mi} {nbio:tanguay_pi}, Ellen’s Bar
• Pierre Cartier, Chansons de la belle espérance
• {nbio:tetreault_ma} {nbio:otomo_yo}, Grrr Tok Ahhh Hmmm
• Jocelyn Robert, Pandore
• Pierre Cartier, Chanson du fil
• {nbio:takumi_se} Antoine Berthiaume, ARC — Beneath the Surface

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While it may not be the most slight and effervescently scintillating folk release of the year , The Eastern Stars still offer up a deliriously pretty and lovable alternative to those fed up with sitting in camping chairs hoping that they won’t have to get up to poke the fire. And boy oh boy, it’s been a heck of a folky year so far, hasn’t it? Luckily, July 5th, 1961 cannot be lumped into that particularly derivative and referentially brazen melting pot. It remains enjoyably winsome and whimsical throughout, never overstepping its boundaries or outstaying its welcome.

The glorious lilt of They Know What To Do is testament to The Eastern Stars’ ability to capture the tune you’d follow in your head, as if they were already embedded within and just needed a gentle unearthing. Bouncing acoustic guitars and the gentle jangle of blippy keyboards are seldom joined by any other instrumentation, save for the rather bewitching vocals of Rob Corradetti and Kaia Wong. It its their charming interplay that brings the personality, humanising the spaces constructed by the songs themselves in an illuminatingly personal way. Fuzzier experiments are not as successful, becoming a tad repetitive after some over-zealous exposition. Little Punk is a case in point, its casio intricacies somewhat tarred by daffy lyrics and uninteresting thematic conventions. The following Money Money We Want Yours contains the gem couplet ‘Money money, we want yours, by coercion and by force’, and backs it up with stop-start playfulness and bluesy resignation to poverty. A charmer.

So The Eastern Stars can wrap themselves around a cheeky melody and have a way with words. Big deal, so can everyone else. What separates them from those already endowed with more than a day’s songwriting experience is their wibbly charm, their sense of ramshackle experimentation without losing focus on the omnipotence of the woozy spirit behind it. Recorded in an alley shadowed by the Empire State Building, this has ‘written and recorded in one night cos we were bored’ written all over it, but the sheer warmth of delivery makes up for any slightly predictable troubadour tendencies. And even then, there aren’t many of those moments flying around. The Eastern Stars manage to conjure and sustain their own dream-like atmosphere without intruding on our own – a snapshot into a warped and comforting world of love and light.

The Eastern Stars have created an escapist sort of music devoid of place and time. It has older influences transfigured (or transfixed) through today. The effect is interesting — it sounds completely modern but in a throw-back sort of way.

It can be very sparse at times, with the guitar barely clinging to the drums, a loose vocal track placed on top of that. It has a stripped down folk aesthetic with some experimental sounds put in — this could be a great soundtrack for reading old Jack Kerouac writings. That’s it! Luna crossed with Kerouac crossed with transcendental existentialism.

Rob Corradetti and Kaia Wong did most of the work on this album. They’re also in a psychedelic pop band called Mixel Pixel. The music here was created under escapist tendencies back in 2001, with Rob and Kaia writing music in their Koreatown, Manhattan loft, to escape the other chaos around them. In a way they were going back to 1961, musically speaking. The music really has some retro-nostalgic vibes to it, in the same way that listening to the Carpenters can take you back in time instantly upon hearing it. The atmosphere of the music is permeated with the aesthetics of the early 60’s, not in a superficial way, but in a comfortable way.

There’s a haunting harmony betweeen Rob’s low tones and Kaia’s higher pitch. They sound ghost-like, their voices breathing out an aural glow over the top of slightly reverbed acoustic guitar.

There’s some really interesting forays here, but the music sometimes suffers from sounding incomplete. Experiments indeed, some of these songs start sounding like demos or unaltered recordings all done in one take. I keep wanting them too pull it off and sometimes they just barely miss the mark. Sometimes they confidently hit the mark though, and faith is restored. It’s interesting to listen to. Which is great for the folk vibe, and it can be more real than super glossy studio polish, but this sometimes comes across as skinny. It’s also one of the interesting dynamics on the album. Doesn’t that sound complicated? It sounds too rough… but I like how it sounds unfinished! It’s where The Eastern Stars land that’s really captivating. 3.7 out of 5 stars