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Harvest Sun Promotions presents...



LAURA GIBSON

(www.lauragibsonmusic.com)

The Readymades

http://www.myspace.com/readymades

Geoghegan Jackson

http://www.reverbnation.com/geogheganjackson

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7:30pm, 11 April @ Leaf on Bold Street

Tickets £7 available from

Ticketweb: http://tiny.cc/2pzd3

Probe Records & The Music Consortium

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Harvest Sun are very proud to present one of our favourite new artists around, the fantastic LAURA GIBSON whose new album 'La Grande' is one of our favourite records of the year so far. It is going to be an incredibly atmospheric show at Leaf on April 11th.Praise for 'La Grande':

"Squeaking with the glamour of a rusty gramophone, [it] flashes with delicate splendor...Gibson's voice is 100 per cent her own." 8/10, NME



"An alluring blend of analogue alt. country and contemporary nu-folk." -**** 4 stars, Uncut



"Curiously beautiful....

The songs crackle and sparkle with instrumentation--including vibes, woodwind, marimbas, pump organ and piano--with layers of Gibson's distinctive voice, girlish and pretty, but cracked and splintered like glass." **** 4 stars, Mojo



"Sweet trad country, haunting torch songs..." **** 4 stars, Narc



"The kind of album that requires the listener to invest a bit of time but the rewards are plentiful." **** 4 stars, ArtrockerMore info on 'La Grande':La Grande (pronounced in the way of the American West, without any hint of French inflection – “luh grand”) is a town just east of the Wallowa Valley in northeastern Oregon where native Oregonian Laura Gibson found inspiration while writing the songs that would become her new album of the same name. Gibson describes La Grande as a

place that “people usually pass through on their way to somewhere else, but which contains a certain gravity, a curious energy.” She’s done more than her own fair share of traveling, playing over 200 shows in North America, Europe and Asia since the release of 2009’s acclaimed Beasts of Seasons (Hush Records), and La Grande is, in part, an album about journeys and transitions.

The energy of the title track kicks off the record with a battering ram beat, hitting the ground like a herd of galloping horses. With a Tropicalia pulse, dirt-kicking distortion, whimsical woodwinds and heart murmur hooks on “Lion/Lamb,” and rail-jumping rhythms, majestic melodies and beyond-the-grave broadcasting of “The Rushing Dark,” La Grande plays like an imaginary film score. It’s an album about strength and confidence – about the tension between wildness and domesticity and the courage required to embark upon either path, about asserting one’s will rather than submitting –

and it’s a significant departure from Beasts’ subtle meditations on frailty.

The thematic notion of aggressively taking matters into one’s own hands was at the front of Gibson’s mind during much of the process of developing La Grande, a period in which she also took on the task of transforming a 1962 Shasta trailer into a makeshift studio/private writing place. The twin projects of restoration and transformation – all that sanding, painting and do-it-yourself problem solving – seeped into her music, a sometimes surreal blend of styles that doesn’t belong to any particular decade or genre, but leaves the listener with the distinct impression that something old has been

repurposed in a brilliant new way. Inspiration for Gibson’s work is also drawn from the geography and history of Oregon itself, as reflected in La Grande’s cover imagery. Raised in the logging town of Coquille, Gibson notes, “So much of my upbringing was tied to the forest – economically, visually,

culturally.” The cover photo, revealing Gibson lit by a fire in the dark Oregon forest, conveys both the wildness and strong-willed-ness of the record. The blanket Gibson is wrapped in, which has resided in her family home as long as she can remember, also ties

back to La Grande. Woven in the nearby Pendleton Woolen Mills, the ‘Chief Joseph’ design represents strength and bravery (Joseph was the Nez Perce chief whose people were eventually evicted by the American military from the Wallowa Valley just east of La Grande, but whose efforts both as a leader of resistance and as a peacemaker made him an icon).