SHOWS

BIOGRAPHY

Pit er Pat is the Chicago-based trio of keyboardist Fay Davis-Jeffers, drummer Butchy Fuego and bassist Rob Doran. When approaching a title for the new album, the follow up to 2005’s Shakey, each member of Pit er Pat remembers coming across pyramids in various forms: in random images they encountered, in the course of personal reading, and even in their own drawings. Pyramids were everywhere it seemed, and the strength and symbolism of that shape clicked for the band with the themes of the new album and their nature as a three-piece.

Powerful rhythms provide the solid floor for ethereal melodies and layers of textural samples on Pyramids. Contemporaries describe Pit er Pat’s sound as distinctively modern and fresh. Doran and Fuego’s vocals often flit with Davis- Jeffers’ in an exchange evoking haunting innocence. Contrasts are also present lyrically. On the fatalistic “Time Monster”, Fay illuminates the misconceived promises of passing time:

Time doesn’t care / makes no decisions / they have already been made. / It just moves round the circle / as it always has and always will. / Reminding you in it’s stableness / of your own temporality/ your brief life / your dying/ the world didn’t notice you lived at all.

While that kind of seemingly ominous imagery is repeated on Pyramids, there is also an equally heavy presence of openness and possibility uniting the dualities that this band has come to represent.

Pit er Pat toured extensively through most of 2005 and made their first full circuits of the US and Europe, including tours with Sam Prekop, Menomena and Need New Body. Playing more than 110 shows together made them better as a band and synthesized the sonic evolution that Pyramids represents. But rather than going into the studio with a list of finished songs to put on tape, Pit er Pat instead carried with them the creative momentum that those tours had fueled, recording the music as it came together organically, capturing the sounds at their most fresh.

As with their last release, the 3-D Message EP, Pit er Pat recorded this album at Soma Studios with John McEntire. Pyramids was recorded and mixed in just 11 days – enough time for the band to fully develop their inspirations, while keeping things performative energetically and capturing the details often lost in the club PA. It’s clear that McEntire was very much in-tune with their musical ideas, reflecting the bands’ creativity back on itself in order to aid the full and fluid realization of their ideas.

Pyramids is Pit er Pat’s second full album and sixth release overall. Utterly unique and difficult to pin down with musical comparisons, it’s by far the band’s most comprehensive effort to date.

“Without fuss or fanfare, the group generates 38 minutes of foreboding, arresting music that is more commanding and immediate than the effort of bands with twice the tools.”
~E. Meister, Time Out New York, review of Shakey

“It’s the type of music that anyone with the ability to extract subtle beauties from music will appreciate; it rewards the attempt to earn an understanding of its complexity”
~Cory O’Malley Metro.pop

“Davis-Jeffers’s sweet, airy singing threads through her electric piano lines, which sometimes sound like a slowed-down music box; Doran’s melodic bass and Fuego’s bustling, off-kilter drumming give the delicate tunes harmonic heft and anxious energy.”
~The Reader’s Peter Magarsak on Shakey

“Pit er Pat…rise up from their avant-garde instrumental beginnings to construct an album of curious musical oddities…Semi-melodic keyboards and ethereally tuneless vocals butt up against skillfully disjointed funk, but the music is much more pretty than it is weird. Muso-jazz goes all lovely. How about that?”
~Ken Scrudato, Soma

“Many people may compare them to Blonde Redhead, the Unicorns, and the like, but what makes Pit er Pat so different from the aforementioned bands is that they are able to create actual melodies through the cacophonous soundscapes they produce.
~Legs Scrambler, YRB

“Pit er Pat’s music achieves a strange kind of alchemy. Their new album…pieces layers of bass, drums and keyboards into a skittering tableau that flits between post-rock, free-jazz, and indie rock influences without pledging allegiance to one. The effect is calming and frenetic at once….’
~Vivian Host, XLR8R

“…recalls jazz-influenced post-rock bands such as Tortoise, but is infused with a sense of adventure and childlike whimsy largely absent from any ‘scene.’”
~Charlotte Robinson, Venus