Tuesday Toot is a semi-regular feature here. An invite-only series of short posts where writers, editors, booksellers and other creatives have been asked to share their stuff and toot their own horn. It’s hard to be seen in the digital morass and hopefully this occasional segment will help some of the quality stuff out there get noticed. It should all be things that regular readers here will find edifying.
Today, it’s The Fildenstar. Here’s Kate Rowe:
The Fildenstar was born out of a desire to tell original SF stories, but in song form. We look like steampunk(ish) aviators, and we sing tales from other dimensions. It’s really fun! And I hope, also, that it’s haunting and beautiful for the audience to listen to. We sing about things like ghost butterfly ships, space junk, strange gods, and places where night is illegal. And more importantly, about the people witnessing these things.
Kate Bush is one of my biggest influences, and I often think about her song ‘Cloudbusting’ in relation to The Fildenstar. Like that song, we try to tell you enough of the story, but not everything—we are aiming to make the unusual perfectly believable. Our piano style is fairly simple, classical in style—something like the American Beauty soundtrack but with synth and occasionally percussion.
Our actual names are Kate Rowe and Ryan Morrison. We also perform as singer-songwriters under our own names on the folk festival circuit, both for grownups and for children, and have traveled all round Australia and the UK. We’ll be working on a Fildenstar album soon, so if you’d like to keep in touch, email thefildenstar [at] gmail.com, or visit www.thefildenstar.com to hear a couple of demos. Listen to ‘When the Gods Walked Among Us’: we were playing live with a fantastic percussionist from W.A. called Steve Richter and it was very exciting!
You may remember that I mentioned these guys in my wrap-up about Conflux recently, which is where I saw them. Kate does indeed have a beautiful voice and the storytelling in their songs is excellent. Be sure to check them out if you get the chance. – Alan
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Go you! Go Kate and Ryan! Such a beautiful sound, such beautiful songs. Exceptional.