Bird On The Wire presents:

JESSICA PRATT

"To say that Jessica Pratt is an old soul would be a vast understatement," says Jenn Pelly of Pitchfork. "The young San Francisco singer/songwriter's deeply intimate folk sounds so sincerely cast in from the 1960s that it's hard to believe she didn't release a proper LP during that period of time." Pratt's spooky and seductive self-titled debut is the inaugural release on Tim (White Fence) Presley's new imprint, Birth Records. "I never wanted to start a label," Presley says, "but there issomething about her voice I couldn't let go of."

Pratt's debut release includes recordings from over the last five years, and steady advances in sophistication of recording and melody are evident throughout. To the artist, the record is a time-lapse document of discovery, both musical and personal. But in strangers' hands, Pratt's debut is another kind of discovery altogether. A fully-formed emerald artifact dug up cobwebby and cold but no less green for its time spent buried. Sun-bleached and sounding a thousand years old, Pratt's debut is arrestingly brand dazzling new, and watch how the lights in your living room go soft and yellow when you put it on.



IGNATZ

George Herriman created Ignatz in 1910. It was a vicious mouse in the comic Krazy Kat. Ignatz’ favourite occupation was throwing bricks at Krazy Kats head, who thought it was a love declaration from the mouse. The Belgian artist Bram Devens uses Ignatz as his alter-ego for his own pile of bricks. Acoustic songs wrapped with effects and driven by improvisation and spontaneousness.

“This album feels more fleshed out than its predecessors – less like a haunted house, more like a couple of animatronic polar bears playing the blues in a really good zoo.” (…) “an intriguing cloud-stew of sounds” (…) “There are also vibrational similarities to players such as Jack Rose, Brother JT, Ben Chasny and Matt Valentine [..] but there’s something very specific about the lo-fi approach. The crackedness of the surface here is not exactly like the crackedness of any other music I can name. This is a trick not many can manage these days, so next time you run into Ignatz give him a small whisky and a hot doughnut. He has earned it.” - Byron Coley, THE WIRE