Inhabitants

The Furniture Moves Underneath

Label: Drip Audio Country: USA

"The Furniture Moves Underneath, is the Inhabitants second-full length on the Drip Audio label. The album documents a band continuing to push forward into new sonic territory, further exploring a singular approach to experimental sound, intuitive group interplay and instrumental songwriting.

Inhabitants are an instrumental four-piece from Vancouver, featuring JP Carter on acoustic and amplified trumpet/effects, Dave Sikula on guitar/effects, Pete Schmitt on bass/effects and Skye Brooks on drums. Close dissection of their music may reveal elements of experimental jazz, noise rock and free improvisation. However, the band prefers to approach their music without preconception of genre, creating a self-defined channel of composition and sound.

All active in the Vancouver creative music scene, the Inhabitants are, in part, a product of their environment. You may have seen or heard an Inhabitant playing with bands like Fond of Tigers, the Veda Hille Band, Great Aunt Ida, Josh Martinez, the Tony Wilson 6tet, Dark Blue World, Carsick and/or in collaborations with François Houle, Peggy Lee, The Buttless Chaps and the N.O.W. Orchestra.

In 2005, the Inhabitants released their self-titled debut (Drip Audio), an album Down Beat magazine described as "an aural introduction to a dream". Textura.org also voiced approval, saying the band "strikes just the right balance between experimentation and structure". Later that year the group recieved the CBC Galaxie Rising Star Award at the 2005 Vancouver International Jazz Festival. In 2006, the Inhabitants toured Europe, performing at the Moers Festival in Germany. They were billed as "the most exciting new band in Canada"."-Drip Audio

"Their sound has been called experimental jazz, psychedelic jazz, creative music and post-rock instrumental, but no matter how you cut it, Vancouver's Inhabitants can't be packaged or labelled. They like it like that - they're self-confessed musical rebels. "Some musicians enjoy those boundaries," horn man JP Carter laughs. "I mean, you know there's always boundaries, but we try to ignore them."

This "no boundary thing" drives more than just Inhabitants' sound. It led them to seek the perfect home for their music and their experiments: Jesse Zubot's Drip Audio record label, which is known for its range of experimental jazz and creative composition projects. Nothing is mid-range or predictable in Zubot's stable. "We're all playing a lot of different projects," Carter says of his band. "There are a lot of different influences coming to the music."

It's not just varied ideas that energize this band, though - it's also the way they've come together as a group. They aren't a conventional quartet; in fact, their sound has been described by some critics as resembling two duos. That may well come from their earlier heavy experience as separate projects. Two of them, Carter and Dave Sikula, used to be members of Carsick, another Drip Audio project. Carter insists it was a natural progression for that group to evolve into Inhabitants because, in one form or another, these four musicians have known each other and gigged in side projects for years."-FFWD