Music
Press
“...moody and enchanting lo-fi songs. The pair‘s spare tunes combine plaintive minor-key melodies... and tight, yearing harmonies with touches of electronica thrown into the mix. Both musicians bring a deep and eclectic musical background to their songwriting; between the two of them they’ve worked with indie filmmaker Jem Cohen, avant-garde theater director Richard Maxwell and the cult singer-songwriter Vic Chesnutt, among others. ” - The New Yorker - -
"The Quavers might be better known as T. Griffin Coraline, the tuo of T. Griffin and Catherine McRae. The duo has added two new players for this new project, but the shadowy songs on the Quavers new Lit By Your Phone work a similar magic, painting the edges of low-wattage country-folk with electronics." - -
'Holed up in a basement once used as a bolthole for Latvian sailors, Brooklyn's T. Griffin teamed up with singer/violinist Catherine McRae for this spectral third album. His grainy blend of electro-folk and found sounds (he calls it "porch techno") resembles a hushed collision of Vic Chesnutt, Low and Jim O'Rourke. Deathly strings and lonely guitar - allied to telephone static, samples and snatches of Casio - make this record appear salvaged from some creaky urban junk shop. It holds together admirably, though, its wounded ambience both delicate and dense. " - -
'The New York group's new album, The Sea Won't Take Long searches for the heart of alt-country and finds it in a junkyard full of old computer parts, caught between the melancholy narratives of singer-songwriters and the avant-folk ambience that swirls in the white noise of the city.'-Minneapolis City Pages - -
'... an eerily beautiful mix of acoustic instruments and machinery... The Sea Won't Take Long resembles a short-story collection complete with reoccurring characters... The woman who is haunted by images of trapped sailors in the opening song possibly could be the same woman drowning herself in the closing, title track... An alluring gem of an album that's worth seeking out." - -
'There is a dark beauty around these songs, an Edward Hopper quality of being outside looking on as small dramas are played out. ‘Missouri’ tells one such story: constructed from some electronic noise, percussive loops and threats of banjo, the conjoined vocals elevate the whole thing above the already considerable sum of the parts. It is strange to try to analyse why small squiggles of machine noise and a few lone banjo notes can have an emotional impact.' - -
'Using truncated beats, samples taken from a mini-disc and well-placed sonic effects along with simple acoustic guitar, T. Griffin wrests intensely beautiful and enigmatic lyricisim from his acute observations. His third album, The Sea Won't Take Long is a junk-shop wired rusty heartbeat inhaling and exhaling some of the most masterful and touching songs to come out on record this year." - -
'...deep, haunting densely arranged songs that are part Tom Waits and part Low." - -
'... a mixture of low-fi electronica and rural folkiness that should contradict each other but mesh perfectly into a haunting and soulful, psychedelic, alt-country, techno, gypsy, folk-pop sound... The CD only gets better as it settles into your psyche. The strange electronic noises serve to create a fuzzy static forcefield that encirles the Americana instrumentation and lyricism." - -
"a songwriter in the ranks of Vic Chesnutt, Elliott Smith and Chris Knox." - -
Discography
The Quavers - Lit By Your Phone
currently being played on KEXP in Seattle and The Current in Minneapolis.
downloadable/streaming audio and video available at the Shiny Little Records link below.
also:
T. Griffin Coraline - The Sea Won't Take Long
T. Griffin - Light in the Aisles
T. Griffin - Tortuga
Photos
Bio
Brooklyn duo The Quavers coax a luminous sound out of decayed samplers, walkmans, vibraphonettes, footpedal loopers, tape echo violin and homespun harmonies. Like a space-age Carter Family, they weave low-tech electronics around songs sturdy enough to stand up even if the power goes out. They call it "porch techno".
"Finds the soul of alt-country in a junkyard full of old computer parts." - Minneapolis City Pages
Live, they use a small army of lo-fi loopers, toy samplers and walkmen to augment their acoustic instruments and conjure the sonic atmosphere from their recordings. All the loops are put together live and the audience watches a series of scrapes, thuds, distant train sounds and melodic snippets played over a sampler or a walkman suddenly coalesce into the foundation of one of Griffin's haunted songs.
"...a hushed collision of Vic Chesnutt, Low and Jim O'Rourke." - UnCut UK
The core of the group is T. Griffin and Catherine McRae, and they're joined frequently by Dennis Cronin (Lambchop. Vitamin-D) and Bruce Cawdron (Esmerine, godspeed you! black emperor). They have also collaborated with or backed artists including Vic Chesnutt, Patti Smith, Tom Verlaine, The Ex, members of A Silver Mt Zion and godspeed you! black emperor, and Guy Piccotto as well as filmmakers Jem Cohen, Peter Sillen and Brent Green and theater directors Anne Bogart and Richard Maxwell.
"....Lit by Your Phone, the Quavers’ new texturally rich album, places moody Americana folk under blacklit, lo-fi electronica." - The Village Voice
They have toured the US, Europe and the UK behind their critically acclaimed 2004 album, The Sea Won't Take Long, which they released under the moniker T. Griffin Coraline.
"...an eerily beautiful mix of acoustic instruments and machinery." - All Music Guide
They're curnetly touring behind their CD LIT BY YOUR PHONE. All shows include T. Griffin and Catherine McRae. New York City shows add Dennis Cronin on vibraphonette, lap steel and trumpet and some tours will also include Bruce Cawdron on drums.
about LIT BY YOUR PHONE:
Over the last two years T. Griffin and Catherine McRae spent a lot of time packed into a black 1993 Saturn with a trunk full of instruments and electronics, and no AC. They were doing a long, ramshackle, side-road tour for the 2004 record The Sea Won't Take Long which they released under the name T. Griffin Coraline.
When they got back to Brooklyn and opened the trunk, they found a trove of songs along with the wires, dead batteries, samplers and amps. These songs became Lit By Your Phone, an album full of haunted samples, twin vocals, and narratives gathered on the side of the road. It's a sound that reflects the hallucinatory telepathy that two people can experience after 14 hours in a car together.
This sound perfectly suits songs that are as comfortable with the cast-off souls on the creepy byways of industrial Brooklyn as they are with a war widow on a lost weekend, or a salesman driving across Montana with his lights off. For much of the record Griffin and McRae sing in tight harmony, or unison, which has the effect of making the characters at once sharper and more dreamlike. In many songs you can't tell whether the narrator is a man or a woman. The samples merge with the acoustic instruments so that it's hard to tell where one starts and the other ends. McRae's violin is often distorted to the point that you can't tell it from the guitars.
"Every night we were playing live using two beat-up samplers, a guitar, a violin, some foot pedal loopers, walkmans, a tape echo and this thing called a Bittrman" says Mcrae. "And the sounds we were making started to really surprise us. It was balancing in a strange limbo between old fashioned porch music and a really dog-eared electronica."
"There was this great tension about the way we were playing," says Griffin. "We were creating this really huge, layered sound. We wanted to capture that when we got back to the studio. So we made a rule: we’d only use the gear we had in the car. We did as much of it as possible live. We used our footpedal loopers and cheap samplers even though it would have been easier to do the same things with a computer. We wanted to keep that off-kilter edge." "The thing is," he adds,"we were never doing any of this sonic adventuring to be experimental; to us it just seemed natural. I look down at the blinking lights in front of us when we play and I think: 'these are folk instruments now'."
Though most of their touring was as a duo, Griffin and McRae have an extended family of musicians that join them frequently. The most consistent of the them, Dennis Cronin (Vitamin-D, Lambchop) adds spare flashes of vibraphonette, lap steel and trumpet and joins them for most of their East Coast shows. Montrealer Bruce Cawdron (godspeed you! black emperor, Esmerine) fits his Mo Tucker toms and oceanic cymbal washes around the shuffling sampled rhythms and oft
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