Bay Area via Brooklyn band POINT REYES – named after founder Asa Horvitz's hometown – comes to the Mudlark Public Theater in New Orleans as part of a 35 concert national tour, following four months living in Warsaw, Poland. While living in Warsaw, the band wrote and recorded WARSZAWA, their debut full-length record, released on CAKES AND TAPES (Portugal/NYC). WARSZAWA features cover art by Wilhelm Sasnal, Poland's leading contemporary painter, and is co-produced by Chicago's Neil Strauch (Joan of Arc, Bonnie Prince Billy, Andrew Bird).
POINT REYES plays, in the words of one Polish critic, "powerful, strange, American music" – contemporary songs that combine a stunning list of influences; from Motown to mid-60s Miles Davis, from Charles Ives to Captain Beefheart to Joanna Newsom, from the New York downtown scene to Walt Whitman. The result is a sound that is absolutely their own: as BreakThruRadio observes, "Point Reyes has no propensity to emulate other artists."
POINT REYES' performances combine razor-sharp classically educated musicianship and the simplicity of great pop songwriting, with the energy of post-punk bands like Sonic Youth and a free-jazz musician's liquid sense of spontaneity. Film projections of ancient forests, endless Communist apartment blocks, and intimate portraits of people taken across Poland create a backdrop for songs about contemporary life in Eastern Europe and America. The instrumentation is expansive and colorful – cello, vibraphone, marimba, drumset, bass, guitar, and voices interweave, creating a unique sonic world that mirrors the originality of Horvitz's texts.
To get POINT REYES off the ground, Asa Horvitz suggested that percussionist Kyle Farrell and cellist Daniel Bindschedler join him in Warsaw, Poland (where he was working supported by a Fulbright grant) to spend four months writing, rehearsing, and giving concerts in a completely foreign environment. Farrell and Bindschedler jumped at the opportunity and in May 2011 the trio moved into a sunny attic loft across from the Vistula river. Throughout the summer, POINT REYES immersed themselves in Poland: they performed in towns where no Americans had performed before, rehearsed ten hours a day in the basement of the Fryderyk Chopin Academy of Music, studied Polish, swam in flooded meadows, became obsessed with Communist architecture, played major festivals in Krakow and Berlin, collaborated with Polish musicians and theater artists, and wrote and recorded WARSZAWA. The project was funded in part by the Fulbright grant awarded to Horvitz. His compositions for theater director Michal Zadara were described by Jacek Cieslak in Rzeczpospolita, a major Polish daily newspaper, as “living minimalist music, impressive pieces of a larger work", and he has been traveling to Poland to collaborate with Polish musicians and theater artists since 2007.
POINT REYES was founded in Brooklyn in late 2010, and released their first EP as a trio,Wetnurse/POINT REYES, in March 2011. BreakThru Radio called the recording, "A unique dichotomy between acoustic and electronic elements…" and wrote that "what makes their music unusual is its obscure alchemy.... anything but lazy… Horvitz has the insight of a visionary.” Bolachas Gratis called POINT REYES ….a great band from Brooklyn who deserve attention." Amber Coffman of Dirty Projectors commented "omg" on the download link on Facebook, and the band still isn't exactly sure what she meant.
When Bindschedler, Farrell, and Horvitz joined forces to become POINT REYES they brought together an eclectic range of talents: individually they had performed at venues like Tanglewood and the Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art, with free-jazz master Anthony Braxton, and in indie bands alongside artists ranging from Nat Baldwin to Kurt Vile to Megafaun. Classically-educated Farrell had recently been reviewed as "sounding like a '70s funk player who ditched their other band members, did acid instead of coke, and got ear infections from swimming in the funk." Bindschedler was described as "the best baroque cellist in Brooklyn who will do a session at 2 a.m." They had also composed award-winning music for dance, theater, and classical ensembles, led marching bands and experimental theater companies, sung medieval chant, received advanced degrees in music therapy, and conducted ethnomusicological research in five countries. Joining them for this tour is Jack Randall, a classically educated composer and multi-instrumentalist who has toured China as a singer, and had recordings produced by members of Ariel Pink's band.
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