Helen Gillet w/ Nicholas Krolak

Helen Gillet is a singer-songwriter and surrealist-archeologist exploring synthesized sounds, texture, and rhythm using an acoustic cello.  For someone with her varied background, New Orleans, with its mix of cultures and musics, seemed like a natural place to call home.  She was born in Belgium, raised in Singapore from the ages of 2 to 11, and routinely shuttled between the homelands of her Belgian father and American mother.  Over the years — working in New Orleans with musicians of all stripes, from avant-garde jazz and classical to pop and funk — Gillet has developed a singular polyglot style. The core of her work is solo performance with live looping, layering cello parts and vocal lines. Rhythmic figures emerge with bowed or plucked ostinatos or a variety of rubbing and slapping on the body of the cello, then enhanced with melodies played or sung in her haunting alto. Her mixed musical vocabulary is commensurate with her disparate travels — French chanson of the 1940s, Belgian folk tunes sung in Walloon, a mix of rock and punk from the likes of PJ Harvey and X-Ray Spex, and her own affecting originals, like audience favorite “Julien,” sung in a mix of French and English. Gillet’s solo performance is known for its enigmatic quality as she fabricates each song with innovative use of the cello and true mastery of live looping technology. My name is Nicholas Krolak, bassist/composer, hailing from the city of brotherly love. I am a young veteran of Philadelphia’s blue-collar music scene, where we exist in the shadow of NYC, and don’t have access to mega-donor-art endowments and generally have to do everything ourselves. The Philly DIY mentality plays a big part in my music and probably why I tend to lash out like a rebellious teenager at all the music industry status-quo/gate-keeper BS … at least that’s what my therapist says … The music I make tends to not conform to any specific genre, while hovering around principles of improvisation, ambience, and experimentation. My discography has been described as ‘eco-jazz’, ‘art-punk’, and ‘neoteric noise’