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Treefort Music Fest Presents

FRANKIE AND THE WITCH FINGERS

Rich Aucoin

Spacemoth

East Forest Ceremony

Sunday, March 26th

at TREEFORT MUSIC HALL

$30

3:30pm / 4:00pm

ALL AGES

Free with Treefort wristband.

All tickets are General Admission.

#treefort11 | March 22-26, 2023

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@RILEYSMITHPHOTO

Rich Aucoin

A multi-sensory spectacle of a show “Part Daft Punk-inflected Dan Deacon, part DIY-driven Flaming Lips as filtered through Girl Talk” (Austin Chronicle). A band of keyboards/synths/guitar/bass/drums/horns playing in sync to everything from old films to Youtube videos. An interactive show which can be viewed like theatre or immersive; underneath a large parachute from kindergarten and a sea of confetti. Aucoin has been long-listed for the Polaris Music Prize twice. His music video for “Brian Wilson is A.L.I.V.E.” won the Prism Prize. Aucoin has built a reputation as one of the best live shows in Canada according to CBC Radio3. His albums sync to old movies like Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of The Moon with The Wizard of Oz. He has performed at dozens of festivals including Osheaga, Great Escape, Les Eurockéennes, Berlin Music Fest, Art Basel Miami, Luminato Art Fest, Iceland Airwaves, SXSW, and Pop Montreal. He has won 5 Nova Scotia Music Awards and 3 ECMAs and has been nominated 11 times. He won Best New Artist at the Canadian Indies. “How It Breaks” went #1 on the CBC Top 20 Countdown. His music videos and streams have garnered over 2 million views. He cycled across Canada and the US for music tours for charities.

Spacemoth NPNF PoonehGhana Lead1 Tif

Spacemoth

Devotion to music has driven Spacemoth’s Maryam Qudus—a performer, composer, and now sought-after producer—for as long as she can remember. At age twelve, she traded chores for guitar lessons; at sixteen, she took on after school jobs to pay for voice lessons, learning to drive so she could take herself to both. As a first-generation Afghan-American child of working-class immigrant parents, finding a place in music has been nothing short of a challenge for Qudus.“Women are often discouraged from pursuing music in the Afghan & Muslim community, and those who follow that path receive a lot of heat,” she explains. 

Qudus’ earliest creative pursuits began with her solo project Doe Eye, which found quick success with radio play, magazine features and blogosphere buzz after 2014’s T E L E V I S I O N—a lush collection of indie pop and spacey rock produced by John Vanderslice at his legendary San Francisco co-op-turned-studio Tiny Telephone. Working with Vanderslice opened new artistic avenues for Qudus:“Seeing the lit up VU meters on the console and multiple tape machines running really inspired me. I realized the studio is an instrument and if you know how to use it, you can take advantage of that in really cool ways.” She began studying at Bay Area recording arts non-profit Women’s Audio Mission, eventually interning both there and at Tiny Telephone before becoming a staff engineer at both. Studio tricks picked up from clients like Wax Nine’s Sad13, Toro Y Moi, Sasami & Tune-Yards gave new inspiration for her own arrangements. And in betweensessions, she was able to toy with electronic ambience and tape experimentations for Spacemoth—her latest solo project.

Spacemoth’s debut album, No Past No Future, will be released July 22nd, 2022 on Wax Nine / Carpark Records. Rich in intergalactic, avant-pop, No Past No Futureserves as a reckoning point between nostalgia and nihilism; it explores the struggle to hang on to a moment as it warps in time. The bulk of performance and production comes from Qudus herself, who favors vintage synths like the Yamaha CS-50 and Korg Polysix alongside fluttering tape manipulations; creating cosmic, lush soundbeds, drawing comparisons to beloved projects like Broadcast and Stereolab. Every track flows with Qudus’ low timbered vocals, in harmony with the watery, glowing synthesizers that anchor the album. The result is an album radiating in astonishment at the emotional landscape humans contain within ourselves, and in wonder at the preciousness of our time on earth.

East Forest

East Forest

“East Forest is tied to both nature and to everyday urban life, giving it the qualities of a sort of ethereal and mystical modern-day fairytale. It’s just blissful.” (NPR)

East Forest is a unique bird in the Wild West aviary of electronic-chamber music, bridging the digital and natural realms. While his electro-acoustic ambient ‘soulgaze’ can be contextualized along with Aphex Twin, Philip Glass and Sigur Ros, the fundamental mission of his project is to create sonic architecture for listeners to explore their inner space. As a leader in the field of wellness, he offers a spiritual yet non-religious pathway aimed squarely at the challenges of our contemporary lives. It is a process of opening doorways through myriad offerings, including his music, talks, podcast, and retreats. East Forest invites patience. Patience, while typically thought of as kryptonite in the instant gratification, hyper-speed world of music and modern life, might just be the medicine we need.

Nature indelibly made a huge impression on East Forest, who grew up in the Pacific Northwest. Making his way to NYC, he discovered indigenous traditions and their relationship to both sound and ceremony. Eventually he started leading underground shamanic ceremonies across the country as he began curating his own source recordings from sound meditations and therapeutic psychoactive psilocybin-mushroom ceremonies. Playing in the shadows allowed the patient sound of East Forest to emerge: an emotional and spacious lexicon born out of a practical need to play solo for six hours, and a goal of developing a protocol and musical landscape to guide a room of listeners in deep psychedelic meditation.

“Full of rich bass, introspective soundscapes, the biophany of nature, and live instrumentation ranging from a wooden flute to a mylodica, East Forest doesn’t just create sound, he creates narrative.” (Huffington Post)
Word organically spread as a devoted community shared his early albums, leading to glowing nods of approval from the likes of NPR and Wired. He completed multiple tours across the U.S. and Europe and shared his mission on the stage of TEDx while performing in a wide range of settings, from SXSW and Summit, to Grace Cathedral and the Esalen Institute. As his diverse catalogue emerged (22 releases total), the music evolved from extended, ambient soundscapes to more concise, structured material occasionally with vocals. “I’ve always been inspired by the natural world and the psychedelic experience as curative tools” East Forest asserts, which he has often implemented in his live recording process. “I prefer to operate where my intuitive musical mind can speak and something larger can come through.”

“The music is a beautiful wash of violin drones, piano and wordless vocals.” (Paste)
As a teacher and facilitator, East Forest has trail-blazed a path in the wellness movement building connections between the digital and natural worlds. As a leader in the burgeoning field of “organic tech”, he regularly cross pollinates his work to bring together the intersection between technology, nature and the human experience — with a brain-body approach aimed towards non-religious yet deeply spiritual personal development; a methodology grounded as much in science as in ritual and ceremony. His collaborations include Google and John Hopkins neuroaesthetics program, Consciousness Hacking, Science And Nonduality (SAND), in addition to his weekly podcast series that offers discussions with thought leaders alongside musically guided original meditations. As a consistent pillar of his public offerings, East Forest offers in person retreats for deeper immersive experiences both at the Esalen Institute where he is a faculty member as well as in his adopted home of the high desert in Southern Utah. His albums and collaborations have three times charted #1 on iTunes as well as several Billboard top ten releases.

In the summer of 2018, East Forest was invited to Maui to record new teachings from the acclaimed spiritual teacher Ram Dass. After capturing his words of wisdom, East Forest returned to the studio to compose the soundtrack to carefully support each songs’ subject. Covering topics such as dark thoughts, nature, technology and much more, these songs are full of timely inspiration. The album was released released on August 9, 2019. Trevor Hall, Stic of Dead Prez, Laura Bird of The Mynabirds, and Grammy nominated artist Krishna Das all make guest appearances on the 14-track album, with reworks by Hammock, Christopher Willits, Laraaji, The Album Leaf, Nick Mulvey, Slow Meadow, and Peter Broderick among others.

“Immersive and vivid” (Wired)
2019 also saw the release of East Forest’s first long-form album, “Music For Mushrooms: A Soundtrack For The Psychedelic Practitioner” (May 2019), a remarkable 5-hour, fully connected experience designed to act as a ‘digital shaman’ to musically guide the psilocybin (the active ingredient in psychoactive mushrooms) experience. The album reached #1 on the iTunes charts after it’s release (iTunes May, 2019). With ten years in development through active research of his own, East Forest offers an unprecedented musical tool to help guide and support the new emerging field of psychedelic therapy, for which music plays a central and fundamental role. Most recently the FDA has fast-tracked psilocybin by recognizing it as a “breakthrough therapy,” and early applications include powerful and lasting treatments for PTSD, depression, anxiety, addiction and likely much more. The “Music For Mushrooms” album is a benchmark experience, serving as a primary tool in this emerging field of research. Read East Forest’s Op-ed on the mushroom project in Flood Magazine.

He has a B.A. from Vassar College and an M.F.A. from the IATT at Harvard University/Moscow Art Theater. He teaches regularly both privately and on online.

“It’s a very cool mix.” (Brooklyn Vegan)