Medicine Singers (ft. Yonatan Gat, Lee Ranaldo, Laraaji) 10-Piece Band, Lee Ranaldo & Maalem Hassan BenJafaar Duo, and Laraaji & Mamady Kouyate Duo
On September 24th, Medicine Singers & Yonatan Gat will return to Pioneer Works for the first time since their legendary inaugural Graveyard Shift performance at The Greenwood Cemetery with a program curated by Gat & his Stone Tapes label.
The concert will feature an epic lineup of collaborators joining Medicine Singers on stage, including Lee Ranaldo, Laraaji, Thor Harris and Gat.
The unique 3-part concert will celebrate the release of the Medicine Singers’ new album as well as the launch of Gat’s new label, Stone Tapes. The immersive site-specific concert will take place inside Charles Atlas’ Mathematics of Consciousness video exhibition at the main hall of Pioneer Works.
The main part of the show will feature Medicine Singers enhanced by Laraaji, Lee Ranaldo, Yonatan Gat, as well as Thor Harris and Chris Pravdica of Swans.
The opening acts will be two intimate duo sets, bringing together artists from different traditions to perform together for the first time. The first will be a collaboration between avant-garde guitar trailblazer Lee Ranaldo (Sonic Youth) and Morrocan gnawa master Hassan Ben Jafaar (Innov Gnawa). The second opening set will be another first-time intimate duo collaboration, between ambient legend Laraaji and West African guitar master Mamady Kouyate (Bembeya Jazz). The two sets will be followed by a special 10-piece Medicine Singers band enhanced by Ranaldo, Laraaji, Gat and Thor Harris and Christopher Pravdica of Swans.
About Medicine Singers:
The Medicine Singers’ groundbreaking debut LP on Stone Tapes embodies decades of musical genres influenced by Native American music, offering what Pitchfork called a “vivid new context for the sound of the powwow drum, highlighting the debt that rock music owes to Native American music.”
This monumental album connects experimental music and traditional powwow in previously unheard ways, acting as a guided tour de force, taking listeners through the many different musical styles with roots (unknown until recently) in Native American music. From psychedelic punk to spiritual jazz, from minimalism to electronic music.
Their live show is the stuff of legend – the Medicine Singers set up, often in-the-round with the audience encircling the band, and go into a trance-inducing set where the walls between band and spectator, as well as between psychedelic rock and shamanic chants, are blurred. Or in the words of Canada’s Exclaim Magazine “the border between audience and performer had all but been dissolved by the sheer power of music. By letting the audience in on the action, [Medicine Singers] evoked a type of bodily experience that transcended mere observation.”
Bridging multiple dimensions of sound, on their debut LP Medicine Singers expanded into a remarkable supergroup that also includes ambient music pioneer Laraaji, Thor Harris and Christopher Pravdica of Swans, and guitarist/producer Yonatan Gat.
Half a decade after the spur-of-the-moment story of how the musicians first met and unraveled their sound on an unsuspecting audience during SXSW 2017 when Gat saw Eastern Medicine Singers play on the street and invited the band to spontaneously join his show – the collaboration between the musicians reaches a climax with this breathtaking debut album as Medicine Singers, helping pave the way to this year’s rising wave of Native contributions to experimental music – shining a spotlight on guest vocalists representing indigenous nations from outside of the Northeastern Woodland tribal area. “Where else can you get all these different native people singing together on an album?” Jamieson asked. “On this album you have east, west, north and south all coming together. That’s why we say it’s medicine.”
Presented in collaboration with Stone Tapes.