Strange Ranger with Bluest (solo) & s_nya at The ZACC

Doors @ 7:00 pm

In one of the few recorded interviews with the elusive Burial, the producer admitted to spending much of his time walking city streets alone, sometimes in pursuit of an obvious objective, other times because he had nothing else to do. “Being on your own listening to headphones is not a million miles away from being in a club surrounded by people,” he said. “Sometimes you get that feeling like a ghost touched your heart, like someone walks with you.”

It’s a disarmingly earnest sentiment, one that has stuck with Strange Ranger’s Isaac Eiger since he first read it years ago, when the band was just getting started playing house show circuits in and around the mountain West. We are taught to believe that life is made up of a series of arrivals, but it is in the liminal spaces where we most often experience the sublime. Strange Ranger’s transcendent fourth album, Pure Music, was made to be heard in private moments between where you’ve been and where you’re going. Though that Burial quote resonates, these songs have a pulse so strong they’re practically breathing; not touching your heart, but gripping it.

Recorded at a cabin in upstate New York as a blizzard raged outside, Pure Music elucidates the promise of No Light in Heaven, a mixtape that hinted the band was cocooned in a state of near total transformation. Pure Music emerged from the same sessions, and while No Light in Heaven resembles, in places, bygone iterations of Strange Ranger’s sound, Pure Music is easily their most exciting and ambitious work to date because it was made with so little concern for what anyone might expect of them, as if they were a band without history. It’s an album that feels out of this time, one that lives in a dimension running parallel to ours.

Bluest is orchestrated by the diary-scrawled lyrical hauntings of Noelle Huser, paying homage to 90s/00s angst pop and country influences, sifting through dreams and nightmares, emboldened with a hunger to return from dissociation back into the body. Huser finds her head in the clouds, heart on her sleeve and feet on the ground running into the unknown in her debut album Cold Sweat released in spring of 2023 through Anything Bagel.

Drummer, producer, and DJ, Cole Bronson (s_nya) has been one of Missoula’s more prolific musical artists in the last few years. Creating under the moniker ‘s_nya’ (sunya) Bronson’s catalog of eclectic, afro-centric, sample-based recordings ranges from hip-hop, to free-jazz, to ambient, and all things in between.

For further information, accessibility, and inquiries please visit https://www.zootownarts.org/meet-the-zacc/about/.

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