Artists
MARK Olson & INGUNN Ringvold
Magdalen Accepts the Invitation is music that will speak to you about things that have happened! An album that sounds like you are out in the desert all by yourself, remembering childhood experiences and musical instruments and all the joy that took place.
“The writing of the music for the new album is the desert I long to return to,” Mark explains. “This valley of sounds is where I really want to be and what takes up the most time in my consciousness. The remembering of how I was just a young teenager driving up Topanga Canyon to a bluegrass festival. The sounds of banjos in the Santa Monica Mountains and the beautiful outdoors.”
“I listened to the folk/blues of Dave Van Ronk and the Brit/folk of the Watersons when I first started out writing songs in my 20s,” he continues. “I really got into the historical/spiritual songs that they offered up. I like themes that are ancient. The title of our new album, Magdalen Accepts the Invitation, relates directly to songs like “Samaritan Woman at the Well,” “The Cherry Tree” and others I learned from these two artists.”
Mark Olson was born and raised in Minnesota by a family of mostly farmers and school teachers. He has been involved with musical instruments since the age of twelve and is self-taught for the most part and uses alternate tunings and two-part unison singing followed then by breaking off into harmony in his writing and live performances. In 1985, he founded the Jayhawks and was a principal songwriter, singer and guitarist for the band’s first four albums. After the Jayhawks, Olson formed the Original Harmony Ridge Creekdippers, touring in Europe and making seven records. With his wife, Ingunn Ringvold, he has made three albums, including Magdalen Accepts the Invitation.
Ingunn Ringvold, Mark’s wife and musical partner, comes from Larvik, Norway, the home of Thor Heyerdahl, the explorer of Easter Island and Kon Tiki raft author. She has been singing in public since she was very young. Her voice is one of natural beauty. She hears music in her heart and writes emotionally dramatic and moving string arrangements. Ingunn also plays Qanon, Mellotron and djembe.
In the late 1800s, Globe Factory No. 23 in New York City was the leading producer of clear Havana cigars for the Seidenberg Cigar Co. Almost a century and a half later, Globe Factory No. 23 reemerged as the solo recording project of Rob Seidenberg, scion of the original cigar family.
The debut GF23 album, The Rut Not Taken, released in April, 2013, began as an outlet for some of the ideas Seidenberg developed while working with other artists as a producer, writer and record company exec. Before moving to Austin, the Buffalo born and bred Seidenberg spent many years in New York and Los Angeles, where he worked as president of Mammoth Records and a senior A&R man at Hollywood Records and Rykodisc. As an exec and/or producer, he has worked with, among others, Fastball, Cody Chesnutt’s band The Crosswalk, Colin Gilmore, Los Lobos, Amanda Shires and John Wesley Harding. In 2013, he founded the Fiesta Red Records label, which has released music by, among others, the Parson Red Heads, Full Service and Blank Slate, and Lowe Country, an album of Nick Lowe compositions performed by the likes of Robert Ellis, Hayes Carll, Caitlin Rose and Ron Sexsmith.
Original Sins for Copycats, the second GF23 album, with it's single "The Summer of '72," references the early sounds that shaped Seidenberg’s sensibility, and concludes with a real-life story of music tragically silenced: the horrific assassination of a popular Mexican band (“Lament for Kombo Kolombia [The Day la Música Died]”). The album’s 13 songs form a narrative birthed at a time of relative innocence and extinguished in an exceedingly more complex, bedeviled age.
A few months after the August, 2014 release of Original Sins saw the release of the GF23 EP, Liquid Courage, a collection of six audio flights of fancy initially inspired by the craft cocktails (and their names) served at Vera, in Buffalo, NY, the beloved hometown of GF23's Seidenberg.
Melodic (with touches of classic metal) and potent (yet capable of emotional subtleties), Blank Slate revels in the many flavors of modern guitar rock.
The band was formed in Austin, Texas in 2011 by singer/guitarist/ songwriter Steve Glazer, bassist Rene De La Mora and drummer Matt Slack. In November, 2012 and April, 2013, the band released two 5-song debut EPs.
Jimbo Pap's members don't wear rhinestoned Nudie suits like the Flying Burrito Brothers did, or like so many of their current peers continue to—in fact, they declare that right away, in the first verse of their debut LP’s first track— but they do represent a modern, updated version of their city's roots-rock legacy. This is a band that makes honest, relatable music about heartaches, tough
breaks and city life with coed vocals and a wry sense of humor that doesn’t strain to be overly clever. In 2019 there’s nothing new about the alchemy of country and rock music, but the devil—as always—is in the details: the way musical artists transfuse these elements is what yields distinction within what we usually refer to as Americana music.
Over a nine-year career that’s seen the band form in Oregon, then move to Los Angeles for nearly six years—where they were influential in a burgeoning music Silver Lake scene still seduced by the specters of Love and Buffalo Springfield—the now Portland-based Parson Red Heads have established a well-deserved reputation as an uninhibited live group.
VARIOUS ARTISTS
Like the famed British Invaders of a generation earlier, songwriter/musician Nick Lowe has mined the various strains of American popular music, purposefully ignoring the lines demarcating separate genres. Among the most prevalent influences on his style has been country music.
Lowe Country presents 13 artists—most of them up-and-coming and/or left-of-center—interpreting songs from Lowe’s 4½–decade career. They range in age from 23
to 48 and reside in such disparate
locales as Glasgow, Toronto,
Austin, Portland, Raleigh and
Music City. They are the leading
lights of a new generation of artists
who use classic country music as
a springboard for their unique
musical explorations.
Icicles and Sand >
A veteran of the Providence, RI rock & roll band The Prime Numbers and the Bay Area acid folk band Dreamland, Michael Macrone finally struck out on his own at the tender age of 55, with Icicles and Sand. A survey of pop/rock styles from his (and the genre’s) infancy to maturity, Icicles and Sand blends power pop and post-punk, folk and psychedelia.
Notorious for operating largely and intentionally outside of the music business establishment, Full Service opts to build national fan-base via direct interaction. Though they tour the country extensively, it’s just as possible to catch the Austin-based band in a performing in a fan’s own
living room (on what the band calls the “20 Tour”). The first artist signed to Fiesta Red, Full Service is also the subject of a full-length documentary film called Takeover. Influenced by
the Chili Peppers, the Beach Boys, Meat Puppets, Faith No More, Flaming Lips and many others, the Full Service sound and performance is one of unpredictable fun, with a surprisingly deep and thoughtful underbelly.
