HoboEye Music:
Chairlift, Brooklyn, USA

Chairlift, a multi-instrumental three-piece, currently hailing from Brooklyn, New York, play a thoughtful, dream-filled pop music, combining the timelessness of unforgettable melody with spare and sophisticated production, a meta-psychedelic worldview, and a classical avant-garde sensibility resolutely and merrily embracing the future.

Chairlift is: Aaron Pfenning, an experimental minimalist guitar player, who creates the delicate haunting quality of Chairlift; Caroline Polachek, a Connecticut-born singer whose vocals shape-shift from the ethereal to the earthy to the evanescent, depending on the particular needs or lines of a song; and Patrick Wimberly, a Nashville native whose decision to study jazz and orchestral arrangements at university first brought him into the radius of the band.

The group's genesis lies back at the University of Colorado, where, in early 2006, fellow students Aaron and Caroline met in an economics class, quickly developing a friendship and musical simpatico that led to the creation of a nascent version of Chairlift. Aaron claims he pulled the band's name from a list of potential monikers compiled by Caroline and stored in a document file on her home computer.

According to Caroline, the young Chairlift played a variety of small local venues in a concerted effort to generate interest in a new music scene in a Colorado festooned with myriad jam bands but precious few neo-popsters on the edge. In June 2006, as one of the local groups booked for the 2nd Annual Lady Ava Pop Festival, sponsored by a Boulder-based indie label, Chairlift was praised in the local press as a "dreamy electro-folk band."

University of Colorado music student Patrick Wimberly, whose tastes ran to Miles Davis, Albert Ayler and Hank Williams, had his mind split open at an early Chairlift performance and vowed to himself that he would one day join this band whose music had already begun to seep into his metabolism.

In April 2006, Aaron and Caroline -- working with Chairlift's pre-Patrick bassist -- recorded the initial tracks for the band's self-released "Daylight Savings" EP at New Monkey Studio in Los Angeles before laying down stakes in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in August of that year. A fortuitous re-meeting with Patrick in Brooklyn coincided with a bass vacancy in the band and Patrick Wimberly became an official Chairlift member in early 2007.

Like Caroline's films, Chairlift is expansive and cinematic, its name evoking an ever-changing vantage point rising (or falling) above the ground. When it came time to write and record the songs for "Does You Inspire You," the band's debut album, the members of Chairlift drew on a vast array of pop influences, finding echoes of country-western ("stiff boots and rawhide") pathos in "Don't Give A Damn," a swaying emo-samba in "Make Your Mind Up," and an ironically sunny evocation of love's turmoils in "Bruises," (which was ironic soundtrack for a 2008 iPod Nano campaign).

Chairlift has been busy during the group's first two years in New York City, releasing the indie single, "Evident Utensil," with a remix by MGMT, in 2007; recording and releasing "Does You Inspire You" in September 2008; and establishing a reputation as a genre-busting live band with a series of unforgettable live concerts.

The initial success of "Does You Inspire You," released on the Brooklyn-based indie Kanine label in September 2008, led to the signing of Chairlift to Columbia Records. For the group's major label debut, Chairlift remixed and mastered "Does You Inspire You" and included two new tracks -- "Dixie Gypsy" and "Le Flying Saucer Hat" -- originally intended for the debut.

"We have the opportunity to add more material that really should've been on there in the first place," said Caroline to NME.com. "So we get to add two new tracks to it, which we're really excited about. Those tracks were really a part of the batch for 'Does You Inspire You' but we didn't have the chance to finish them. Now the complete era will be documented."

Already receiving rave reviews on both sides of the Atlantic -- "utterly magical" (guardian.co.uk) and "earns the rare distinction of holding the songs to back up the buzz" (The Nashville Tennessean, February 24, 2009) -- the era of Chairlift has only just begun.

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As seen on MySpace >
Record label: Columbia Records >