Allegra Krieger and Greg Mendez will be stopping at the 7th Street Entry on Thrusday, October 24th with support from hemlock.
Allegra Krieger: On the ground level of an apartment building in Manhattan’s Chinatown, multiple lithium batteries combusted in an e-bike shop. It was just after midnight when songwriter Allegra Krieger awoke to a banging on her door. She made it out, fleeing down eight flights of stairs and a “wall of grey smoke,” which she recalls in her song, “One or the Other.” Throughout the song, Krieger cradles gratitude and conjures a universe in which she responded differently to the fire. Ultimately, she leaves us with two questions: “What do we know about living? What do we know about dying?”
It was in the months following the fire that Krieger wrote much of Art of the Unseen Infinity Machine, her second full-length album with Double Double Whammy, a collection of 12 songs that pick at the fragile membrane between life and death.
Greg Mendez: Mendez is an intuitive songwriter, melodies channeled through ether, a storyteller who across his catalog has chronicled vivid violence and instability – a wallet chain to the head, a crack house arrest, the misdeeds from addiction that hang around like a ghost of past lives – but it’s threaded together with love songs, too, with odes to friendship, true dedication, the things that can buoy one through the worst. Mendez has a habit of noticing those things, of finding the light, exacting poetry from even the bleakest, shit-caked situations. In his songs there is an innate ability to balance grit with gentleness, cruelties rewritten through preternatural sweetness, a heart thrumming unendingly, confidently, through the dark.
hemlock: hemlock is the “phone-fi” alt-folk project of swamp-raised, multi-disciplinary creative force Carolina Chauffe and various rotating collaborators, currently anchored between Chicago, Austin, and Louisiana, but more often on the highway.
Doggedly DIY, they are an avid diarist & amateur archivist, with a prolific discography spanning hundreds of songs in just half a decade. Their most expansive work yet, 444, independently releases October 11, 2024 as hemlock’s second album of the year. It is a “best of, so far” of Chauffe’s twelve-year, ongoing, phone-recorded, song-a-day-for-a-month project — its 12 tracks recaptured, rearranged, and reimagined with beloved Chicago-based band members Bailey Minzenberger (Friko), Jack Henry (Free Range), and Andy Krull (Red PK) as the backbone and beating heart.
Tickets are still available HERE!