nothin Lys Guillorn Goes Straight To Vinyl | New Haven Independent

Lys Guillorn Goes Straight To Vinyl

Smiling into the camera, musician Lys Guillorn explained that, in a certain way, streaming a show from one’s living room could be more stressful than a live gig” due to what was going on off-camera. Her living room, she explained, was strewn with wires. Her husband was relegated to a seat in the hallway, but he is wearing a Grateful Dead T‑shirt” and festive hat, she added. Then she began the show.

This is a valentine to all of my friends.” She was grateful to have spent the pandemic with her husband, but she was thinking about how many people I missed,” she said. The people I miss are all of you.”

Her first song was filled with that emotion. I am so broken that I’m fixed again. / I’m not afraid to climb the walls. / Now I’m sending words from me to you/ It’s the only kind of therapy I do,” she said. I’m pleased to be on the Earth at the same time / as all of you I know.” The song neared its end with a message tailor-made for a society hoping to wake from a pandemic-induced isolation soon. Gotta keep dancing / gotta keep singing / gotta keep laughing / gotta keep breathing,” she sang.

Guillorn demonstrates a sample record.

Guillorn’s show wasn’t intended solely to reconnect with fans of her music, about 60 of whom tuned in Friday night from Connecticut and beyond to hear her play. It was also to announce a project with Leesta Vall Sound Recordings, a Brooklyn, N.Y.-based studio that creates handmade 7” vinyl records that it can press in small batches. Since at least 2017, Leesta Vall has been doing what it calls direct-to-vinyl recordings of artists, allowing them to make recordings personalized for people who preorder the records. During the pandemic, Leesta Vall (say the name out loud) has reached out to artists to continue coming into the studio or record at home in what the studio is calling a Shut-In Session, to let the project continue.

For Guillorn, teaming up with Leesta Vall began when Leesta Vall reached out to her in December with an offer to work together. My friend Allysen Callery had done a session in their studio pre-pandemic, and had a great experience with them,” Guillorn wrote in an email before the show. The studio gave her the option of coming into New York to record the session live in their studio, but given Covid-19 realities, Guillorn (like several artists in the Leesta Vall catalog) chose instead to record from home.

Now — until tomorrow, March 9 — fans of Guillorn’s music can buy a 7” vinyl record of one of seven of Guillorn’s original songs — Objects in the Mirror,” Sassafras,” Wolverines,” Sunny Side Down,” Silver,” Structure,” or Impossible” — that Guillorn will then record particularly for them, even greeting the purchaser on the record just before the song begins.

That meant Friday night served as a preview of all the songs Guillorn had on offer to be printed onto vinyl (follow this link to a video of the performance). These ranged from the song Silver,” from 2013’s album Winged Victory — which Guillorn would perform unaccompanied for the small-batch vinyl — to songs like Objects in the Mirror,” written this January and as yet unrecorded. I had a few good Fridays where I woke up and knew there was going to be a new song,” she said. I just sat down and started playing and this guitar part came out.” She dedicated the song to Dave Hogan and Mike Wilcox, two fixtures of the Connecticut music scene who died in 2020.

Most of the songs, it turned out, had history. Guillorn said that she first played Wolverines” at Night of the Living Banjo, a multi-band evening at Cafe Nine in 2015 devoted to the instruments. Of the song Sassafras,” she said, I wrote it in my head during a Robyn Hitchcock show at Fairfield Theater Company.” (Guillorn opened for the new-wave legend when he played a solo show at Cafe Nine in 2018.)

The chatbox in the live YouTube streaming session became an easy way for Guillorn to interact with the audience. Someone asked the brand of the small, punchy acoustic guitar Guillorn was playing. It was a Larrivee, Guillorn responded, my pandemic workhorse.” During the shutdown, when she played electric, she half-joked, I usually end up crawling on the floor and detuning it and playing with distortion,” adding that it had been very cathartic.”

What a year, what a year. But we move on,” she concluded.

As her set wound to a close the audience showed no signs of flagging, filling the chat window with applause emoji. I really appreciate you being here in my living room — and your living room simultaneously,” Guillorn said. She proceeded through Sunny Side Down,” from a 2016 EP of the same name, revealing that she was inspired to write the song, from the perspective of a villain,” after being at a diner with a friend who ordered her eggs that way.

She ended with Dolores and I,” which appeared last year on the New Haven-area compilation Waiting on a Sunrise Vol. 1, from Free As Birds Records. Last year when I was furloughed in March and staring out the back window,” she said, she got a call from Alex Burnet asking if she wanted to be on a compilation. She said yes. I sat there and wrote exactly what was going on.” The song stands already as a document to a mindset at the beginning of the pandemic, already looking toward its end.

Thank you all for keeping me sane-ish on the internet,” Guillorn said. We’re trying to get through and I hope to see you really soon.”

Preorders to get a record from Lys Guillorn’s Leesta Vall Shut-In Session end tomorrow, March 9. Another New Haven-based musician, Daniprobably, is taking part in the Leesta Vall direct-to-vinyl sessions in April.

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