You Are The Garden
You Are The Garden embodies the importance and beauty of compassion, listening, and intentionality through their combined voice. Andy Danstrom (percussion and composition) leads the group with his unconventional scores and notation, but beyond his composing, the band’s music becomes the product of all the members. Joining Andy are Miles Allen (clarinet), Sarah Clausen (bass clarinet and synthesizer), Chet Zenor (guitar), and Meredith Nesbitt (cello). Together, they create music that’s like observing plants grow and looking inward. Simple ideas interlock and kaleidoscope together to grow wordless blankets and landscapes that slip away after the show, but spread pollen around to invoke self-love, inspiration, and contentedness. It’s holy music, it’s lovely, it’s magical. It’s the sound of caring.
-Izzy Yellen
Alta Vista
Alta Vista is a collaborative trio featuring Chet Zenor on guitar, Jakob Heinemann on Bass, and Andy Danstrom on drums. Unearthing a century-old book of obscure and unrecorded country songs, Chicago-born trio Alta Vista smears boundaries between reality and memory. The music here displays a vision of America haunted by the ghost of an imaginary past. Rejecting the nostalgic notions associated with Americana music, the group's freewheeling approach touches upon vastly different eras and styles of instrumental music that run the gamut from rhythmically-amorphous ambient, dark and simmering drone, chaotic free improvisation, and driving post-rock, all tethered to cohesion by the three's undeniable symbiosis and the unifying core of country DNA. The groups first album is set to release sometime in 2023.
Knecht
Knecht is the electronic project of Andy Danstrom. The project takes inspiration from experimental electronic artists such as Aphex Twin, Venetian Snares, Jlin and Oneohtrix Point Never, as well as many others. The project pulls heavily from the drum and bass vocabulary but approaches it with the ethos of free improvisation in how the material and forms were developed.
Laminae is the first collection of songs released under this project. It features organic compositions that flow from one idea to the next and back again, with forms that were created like dropping a rainbow of ink into water. Sounds created from bits of social media, video games, and synthesizers.