slowcore

Combining elements of both rock and folk music, along with disturbingly personal sentiments, dark humor, and a voice able to channel both the falsetto highs of Neil Young and the wavering raspy low tones of Leonard Cohen, Toronto's Hayden Desser has spent the last 15 years creating uniquely affecting music. The critically acclaimed musician first appeared in the early '90s armed with only his four-track tape recorder, his unexpectedly low vocal range, and an extremely detuned guitar.

Born and raised in Portland, Oregon, Liam Singer studied piano as a child, and at 14 began recording songs on the accordion, synthesizer and theremin. In the early 2000s, Singer studied music composition at Kenyon College in Ohio, with harpsichord as his primary instrument. During his time at Kenyon he played in several bands and co-founded a 20-piece kazoo orchestra. Returning to Portland after college, Singer recorded his first album, The Empty Heart of the Chameleon, and played keyboards for The Scientifics (now Eliot Rose) and Nate Ashley.

Read more about Liam Singer on Last.fm.

The Montgolfier Brothers are Mark Tranmer and Roger Quigley; Tranmer writes and performs much of the duo's music, while Quigley writes the lyrics and provides their vocals. Both artists have released numerous solo projects on their own, and collaborated with other artists, in addition to recording together as the Montgolfier Brothers. Tranmer -- who is based in Manchester, England -- has recorded under name Gnac (taken from a short story by Italian writer Italo Calvino) in 1996, recording singles for the Earworm and Liquefaction labels.

Orcas is a band by haze-pop auteur Benoît Pioulard and post-minimalist composer Rafael Anton Irisarri (also known as The Sight Below). Theirs is a style deeply rooted in personal variations on songform and ambient craft, and as a duo they bridge the furthest outlying aspects of their previous solo work published on Kranky, Touch, Miasmah, Room40, and Ghostly International. Version II The courtship of ambient music and traditional songform has been a long and tenuous one, almost to
the point that their differences seem irreconcilable. Spanning decades with only a few points of obscure