Tamara Sandor

Tamara has always sat around trying to make herself cry by setting up little weddings between the Ken and Barbie of word and melody. In 2006, living in Hamilton, Ontario, she decided to start recording her songs and playing them for strangers, accompanying herself on guitar, trying to make other people cry. It was in the bustling and intimate Hamilton music scene that she first got her performing legs. She learned how to adjust a mic stand so it didn’t fall over, and someone was even kind enough to inform her that she’d been inserting the pick-up into her guitar upside-down. Good times.

In 2010, Tamara moved to Montréal, where she has been delighted to find collaborators and conspirators of all stripes. For the last two years, she has most often performed as a two-piece band, joined on stage by the idiosyncratic rhythmic stylings of drummer Jon Crellin (Shapes and Sizes, Holy Oak).

Most recently Tamara has been working on a full-length album with engineer and musician Daniel Gélinas (Brahja Waldman Quartet, Klô Pelgag, YouYourself&i). The project, entitled A Bower in the Arsacides, is a collection of 12 songs that, each in their own way, take up the relationship between the autobiographical and the fictional, and marvel at the unlikely ways that dead structures can promote extravagant growth. Tamara sings and plays guitar, mandolin, violin, and thumb piano on the album. All other matters of musical prowess are handled by a number of seasoned guest musicians from the local scene.

Tamara relishes the opportunity that live performance provides to attempt to invoke irreproducible moments of shared emotional excess. The thing she loves best about music as an art form is that it dies. The advent of recording technology complicates, but by no means negates, this love or its reason.

Tamara also sings backvocals in the surrealist country band, Holy Oak, fronted by singer-songwriter Neil Holyoak.

In case you were wondering about major musical influences and unconsciously recurring themes:

1. John Fahey, PJ Harvey, Whitney Houston

2. rootlessness, ecstatic leisure experiences, doomed girl narratives