pictorial candi

Pictorial Candi has successfully gone solo with her sexy guitarrist bandmate that accompanies her on some songs. Her new album and concerts are an ode to teenage years. On how we take on tragedy lightly over our inexpert shoulders and heave light matters tragically. That reversed miscalculation that we make of reality, our haziness in perception, and added, the romantic pulse that goes against all common sense. Forever till you die.

She can also play with her full band but is more excited about her psychedelic emo solo and duo show. 

And now a bit of history:

Late bloomer and still blooming Candelaria Saenz Valiente was sickened by her exhaustive music studies at College and spent all of her twenties writing books and making short films in Buenos Aires, in Warsaw and then in London. True, there were the endless good times and the off your tits cover band Balls Marie, but it wasn't till 2008 at 31 years of age that she performed in her first real band. Overnight she became the "crazy singer" with Paristetris, an avant-punk, primary colored Japanese math pop band, which was a big phenomenon in the Polish underground music scene.  It was a 2 years, 2 albums affair touring around the globe.
It was a natural evolution from crazed math rocker to a gentler version of her wild persona. She was suddenly a prolific songwriter with music oozing out of what had been bottled up for over six years. She then decided to give the keyboards a rest and teach herself a little guitar. Skip James, Son House, Daniel Johnston, those were her figure heads. She recorded a first solo album under the pseudonym Pictorial Candi, which featured purposefully sketchy guitar playing. Pictorial Candi vowed to recreate the feeling she had while listening to her mix tapes in her early teens, that complete nonchalance about genres that made Boy George, Lionel Belasco and Talking Heads sit comfortably alongside Beethoven. In that sense, her first album is highly romantic and nostalgic without overtly being it.
"Eat your Coney Island" included a trombone opus for the accompaniment of thought, a dirty punk track, Caribbean guitar songs, a haunting piece for organ and voice and more. Dots & Dashes put it flatteringly: "Pictorial Candi's debut solo LP, Eat Your Coney Island [...] is as bewildering as it is brilliant and, to contextualize that comment, it’s fucking sensational.â€?
She was now fully immersed in music and fully pregnant. Somewhere in 2012 between her first album, the birth of her daughter and her second album she got flash-blown away by R Stevie Moore, which was exactly akin to her own ideals of rusty perfection. Luckily, later that year, she met him and played support for him in Poland. He is a big influence and a good long distance friend.
Tired of how obsolete CDs had become, her second album DRINK she released physically in the form of a fizzy beverage with a download code at the reverse of the tag. A batch of 600 bottles were done DIY by Candi in her home. Meth pop, the first flavor was terrific, the other turned out to be a punch in the face, which funnily enough, was the actual name of it. DRINK was a more cohesive sounding album, perhaps more catchy than the first, but still following the mix tape idea. It was a psychedelic pop album with a last bonus industrial grimey techno track. Here's a more Ibiza-ish remix of the last track by "old time" collaborator Eddie Stevens:
http://pictorialcandi.bandcamp.com/track/snow-valley-night-eddie-stevens-remix

With her band mates Marcin Masecki, Tomek Pop (Ed Wood), Malgosia Penkalla (Enchanted hunters) and former guitarist Adam Byczkowski (Better Person) they've played at The Great Escape in Brighton, at Off Festival, Artloop Festival, with Sean Nicholas Savage in his first visit to Poland and opened up for R Stevie Moore. They've taken it easy to make a quiet space for Candi's 2 year old daughter, but would now happily return on the road again.

Extra notes:
She is a cartoonist and the author of a novel and a book of short fiction. In literature she is generally fascinated with topics like dreary middle aged people who cease to be persons to become guests at holiday lodges, excessive sensibleness, illogical behavior, - things mostly found in existentialist novels -, the cosmos and the art of vacationing. Her most prominent invention is the Ebertonium Candelaria, an electrical, polyphonic synthesizer based on tuned light bulbs. She played the Ebertonium in the concerts following the first album. She studied Film in Universidad del Cine and composition in Berklee College of Music in Boston.