| |
|
Ex Reverie, a glam folk project conjured forth from the fertile musical community of North Philadelphia, is a showcase for the bewitching talents of Gillian Chadwick. The project's debut album The Door Into Summer was co-produced by Chadwick and Greg Weeks at Weeks' Hexham Head Studio in North Philadelphia, and features contributions by members of Espers, Fern Knight, Woodwose and Golden Ball among others. The Door Into Summer is being released on Language Of Stone, the label run by Greg and Jessica Weeks, distributed by Drag City. The music was performed primarily by Chadwick on lead vocals, guitars, dulcimer, percussion and keyboards, David Chadwick (Golden Ball) on bass, Margie Wienk (Fern Knight) playing cello, and Greg Weeks (Espers) providing acidic lead guitar, background singing, recorders and organs, along with drummer Julius Masri and additional touches by violinists Katt Hernandez and Gretchen Lohse and flautist Jessica Weeks.
In a post 70's realm, the struggle is to circumnavigate irony without succumbing to blandness or facile dictations of woe. Ex Reverie's The Door Into Summer maps that route with crystalline authority. Gillian's conscious employment of the fantastic within epic confines heralds a return to a reality deeper than most modern folksinger neo-realists can manage to muster. The Door Into Summer evokes a unique realm wherein dulcimers and glam-rock guitar frenzies manifest with uniform importance; the trick of knowing not to discern a difference between them is one which Gillian understands better than any other current acolyte of storied 70's sonic alchemist Tony Visconti (Tyrannosaurus Rex, David Bowie). Lyrically deft and delicate, Gillian's degree in Philosophy as well as a life-long love for myth and science fiction all speak through, and carry the listener through this diaphanous landscape.
|
|
Back to Clients
-------------------------------
Gillian comes by the myth and science fiction influences honestly, having been named after a character in Robert Heinlein's Stranger In A Strange Land (she borrows the title of The Door Into Summer from that same author). As a girl, Gillian learned to play guitar in a tiny antebellum house perched above the Blue Ridge Mountains; friends and family gathering around the woodstove or out on the tin roof looking at the stars as she gamely picked her way through hippie folk favorites. Teenage imaginings transcend childhood's end and lodge with concrete ferocity within the sound world of adult reality, and so it was with Gillian. Just as her lifelong fascination with herb lore propelled her into making and bottling her own tinctures and tonics, so Gillian's coming-of-age obsession with David Bowie inspired her to serious musicianship. Moving with her parents to Eastern Pennsylvania's bohemian-friendly Bucks County, Gillian began obsessively writing and recording songs and performing live both as a solo acoustic artist and with local Death Metal outfits. Gillian then met and married David Chadwick, leaving college to pursue her musical passion and to craft and sell "fairy crowns and elf wear." (She eventually returned to finish her degree in Philosophy, where her expertise was in Pragmatic Aesthetics – e.g. "the art of moments," Dewey, Duchamp, Kaprow, &c.)
Outside of Ex Reverie -- when not fashioning leather and ostrich feather belts or stitching a new pair of bloomers -- Gillian is lead guitarist for David's project Golden Ball, which has been lauded as Philadelphia's "best new weird band" as well as "quite possibly the prettiest Philly band of all time." Gillian also collaborates with Jessica Weeks as Woodwose and with England's Sharron Kraus as Rusalnaia.
|
|
|
|
