The quartet featuring singer Laurel Premo creates organic, boundary-pushing music, with two special, visually enhanced concerts this week at a Grand Rapids planetarium. The back story at Local Spins.
Freeing Music in a Sensory-Enveloping Environment: Slow Spell (Courtesy Photo)
Traverse City musician Laurel Premo has long leaned on her multi-instrumental songcraft, whether performing with the internationally acclaimed Red Tail Ring folk duo or her own solo guitar venture showcased on 2021’s “Golden Loam.”
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So when Premo was invited to join a new experimental rock project dubbed Slow Spell, it gave her the singular opportunity to use her vocals as one of the band’s instruments.
“When I started creating music with Slow Spell, it was at a time of nurturing a more substantial relationship with my voice after working with instrumental music for some years,” she says of joining Traverse City drummer Will Thomas, bassist Peter Lepczyk and guitarist Chris Stefanciw in late 2022.
“The safe nest of this project was a very freeing place to get to understand the shape of it. … It’s raw, powerful stuff. I sing drawing from my core world view and from the energy and stories of what I feel coming up from my bandmates, and frankly, the whirlwind of the whole global field.”
Thomas describes the band’s sound “as somewhat enigmatic, but Slow Spell is essentially an experimental rock band. We use a familiar rock formation to create rhythm and tension and color and space. It all develops organically, completely born of what happens when the four of us just play.”
Fans in Grand Rapids will get a chance to experience that experimental and organic music in an unusual space, accompanied by striking visuals.
Slow Spell will play the “Concerts Under the Stars” series in the Grand Rapids Public Museum’s Roger B. Chaffee Planetarium at 7:30 p.m. Thursday and Friday (March 13 & 14), with Emily Hromi’s visual art unfolding as part of the two-set show – the first half featuring prepared music and the second half “completely improvised.”
Tickets, $24, are available online here.
“We’re hoping to invite people into the belly of that awake-and-alive creative presence that’s shared at the heart of the group,” said Premo.
“When I go into a session making new music with these boys, it feels like we’re four parts of one organism. We twine in different pairs, erasing into each other for 15 minutes before grabbing a gasp of air. At the core is an attentiveness and a willingness to bend into unexpected territories.”
Thomas had suggested that Premo “fill the role of the ‘guttural moan,’” and Premo conceded that at times she’s “just singing one extremely long, drawn-out word as a sustain pedal below the guitarist’s work.
“I’m standing in the front because I’m singing words, but this is a band that is presenting four strong voices.”
LISTEN: Slow Spell, “Forest Floor”
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