Avestruz Nick Kuepfer

Description

Nick Kuepfer has been a fixture of Montreal's avant/folk/improv underground since moving to the city in the mid-2000s. Nick has done service in numerous groups past and present, including L'Embuscade, Echoes Still Singing Limbs, Aids Wolf, One Candle Power, and Hrsta. Kuepfer also hosted wonderfully claustrophobic shows at his Rap Machines rehearsal and screenprinting space (until eviction by the landlord in 2011) and he continues to design and screenprint under his Daygristle moniker.

Avestruz is a sketchbook of sorts, a compendium of mostly short pieces that usually start with acoustic guitar riffs, looped and/or layered sometimes with the addition of hand-percussion (pots, pans and kettles), the occasional bowed string, and various field recordings. Self-recorded on a variety of lo-fi sources 'in the field' while Nick was traveling through Argentina in 2007-2008, the album has a beguiling vagabond spirit and palpably conveys the sense of solitary wandering through unfamiliar land, documenting its musical and sonic impressions. There is a sense of real immediacy and site specificity (cultural and geographic) on this collection of recordings, and a humble paean to mystical nature percolates throughout, a very gentle sense of psychedelic motion channeled by the calm but wide-eyed euphoria and attention that accompanies rough unsanitised travel.

Avestruz is like a sonic slideshow of Kuepfer's travels – musical snapshots taken at various 'magic hours' where the light makes everything hum and glow from within.

Kuepfer initially circulated a few CD-Rs of Avestruz locally in Montréal, screenprinted with the Echoes Still Singing Limbs moniker. But the Echoes project soon evolved into a full band project and a very different beast; Nick agreed that Avestruz ultimately ought to carry a different moniker, and as it represented the first overt and official release of his solo music, he decided to step right up and put his name to it!

Credits

All music created and recorded by Nick Kuepfer