Author pineross
Remember the River | An Experience in Dance, Music and Folklore
Saturday, May 27
Kinetic Arts Tucson
435 E. 9th St
Doors 7pm
A one night only performance at Kinetic Arts Tucson benefitting Western Watersheds Project with Hatpin Duo! This is a limited seating event, THIS EVENT WILL SELL OUT! So get your tickets asap to make sure you get a seat. Come celebrate and donate, with live music and dance, and remember the river.
Colorado Tour – May 2023
Colorado! Pineross will be hitting the road this May as a trio featuring Jake Ransom on percussion/electronics and Daniel Becker on bass clarinet. We’ll be performing at some longtime favorite venues, having a lot of potlucks, and playing music from our new album, Dragoon.
May 4/5 Durango | iAm Music Festival
Lola’s Place Stage
7pm
May 6 Crestone | T Road Brewing Co
7pm
with Maco Terr
May 7 Buena Vista | The Stardust Event Center
5:30pm potluck 6:30pm show
$10 suggested donation
with Maco Terr & Jovan Mays
May 11 Fort Collins | Wolverine Farm Publick House
6:00pm show
$10 suggested donation
with King Bee & Laura Goldhamer
May 12 Colorado Springs | Mesa House concert
5pm potluck 6pm show
w Patchwork Jack, King Bee & Laura and Alex
May 13 Denver | Leon Galley
7:30pm doors 8pm show
with King Bee
Tickets
Dragoon album premiere – Pop Matters
PINEROSS’ ‘DRAGOON’ IS SOUTHWESTERN ELECTROPOP CINEMA (PREMIERE)
By Jonathan Frahm. Originally published on Pop Matters
For nearly 15 years, Pineross has been a means for Kevin Larkin to express his feelings in avant-garde movements. Where his self-titled debut album explored themes of the dying Old West, Dragoon is an experimental indie pop examination of the modern Southwest. Courageous, harrowing, and invoked with an autumnal spirit, the latest Pineross effort, Dragoon, is another natural extension of Larkin. It showcases his current state of mind as an artist whose pandemic story brought him to write songs along an Arizona mountainside.
Pineross tells PopMatters, “This is the third Pineross LP I’ve released over the past 14 years, and they have all emerged during big transitions in my life—mostly when moving to a new place. I think of each album as a very personal exploration of creativity, more focused on the studio process as opposed to a live project. I always meet new collaborators when recording, and the music takes on the feel of the place it was recorded – each has felt like a ‘concept album’ that way.”
“For the new album, I had written a few songs during the pandemic in the Dragoon mountains of Southern Arizona. Being new to the area, I was deeply affected by the beauty of the desert and the underlying sadness of the thousands of migrants who walk through it every year in search of a better life. It is a stunningly beautiful place, one of the most biodiverse regions in the country. Underneath it, all is a long history of violence.”
Larkin weaves this latest Pineross story by no conventional means. The opening track, “Forgotten Angle”, meditates on its unifying chorus (“we can’t exist alone”). Its ambling vibe exists within the space between Ennio Morricone and Andrew Bird, invoking a cinematic culmination of organic instruments that begin to invoke subtle, whirring electronic breakbeats at its midway point.
Pineross continues to showcase a penchant for offbeat musical expression through the electropop of “Any Color” and its stellar keyboard solo, as well as the titular “Dragoon” and its ambient exploration of soul, surf, and electronic tones. It all comes together with the closing ballad “I Can Still Remember”, offering another stirring meditation as electronic percussion crackles around Larkin’s ruminative vocal cadence and a gorgeous piano forefront.
Pineross continues, “The songs that I had written really fit in well with a collection of unreleased soundtrack music that I had laying around from a few years ago. One day I wrote all of the titles down, and it was immediately clear that there was an album there—everything was in the right order with key changes, transitions, and the arc of a story. Then I knew it was time to start recording!”
Pineross shares a ticket with Desert Fantasy as they both celebrate their album releases at Tucson’s Club Congress on 21 September. Pineross will be joined by Red Herring Puppets, who will play an integral part in his visual performance by offering projections and shadow puppetry to the show.
Reflecting on the relationship between Dragoon and puppetry, Pineross says, “Lisa Sturz from Red Herring Puppets was one of the first artists that I met after moving to Tucson. Over the past few years, I have arranged and produced the music for a handful of their shows, and I always knew that I wanted to make a music video with her. She suggested participating in one of their Puppet Slams where I would sing a song, and she would puppeteer.”
“We ended up creating a shadow puppet series for a few songs on the album—a story of migrants crossing the border for a better life while facing incomprehensible challenges. Puppets have a really powerful aesthetic; they add an element of softness and whimsy to stories with heavy subject matter. Throughout human history, they have helped us find joy in times of struggle. We’ll perform for the album release and then put out the music video version sometime in the next few months.”
This article originally appeared in Pop Matters.
‘Dragoon’ album release show
I am beyond excited to debut the new Pineross album ‘Dragoon’ on September 21 at Hotel Congress with my good friends Desert Fantasy and Red Herring Puppets. Tickets are $10 and can be purchased here.
Pineross’ new album Dragoon, will come to life with a multimedia performance featuring visual projections and shadow puppetry by Red Herring Puppets. The experimental nature of the performance is the latest evolution in Kevin Larkin’s (aka Pineross) unconventional career. The songwriter and sound artist spent the last decade creating theatrical productions with Denver based art-folk band Chimney Choir, performing while suspended from trees during the Breckenridge International Festival of Art, and designing an interactive sound installation as Artist in Residence at Great Sand Dunes National Park. Larkin recruited a wide range of local musicians to create the genre-defying atmosphere on Dragoon, with guest appearances by members of Desert Fantasy, Los Esplifs, Sharkkheart, Katie Haverly, and bass clarinetist Charles Du Prez. The album takes the listener on a journey into the borderlands, where history and mythology blend into polarized reality, ultimately searching the horizon for a moment of peace.
Monsoon Mixtape and Santa Cruz Sound Experience
I’m very honored to have contributed an original track to the Monsoon Mixtape, a collaboration between artist Alex! Jimenez and Tucson Water that started with community submissions of monsoon field recordings. I was one of 6 producers to incorporate the sounds into a composition.
On Friday June 24th at 7pm, Tucson Water invites you to the Santa Cruz Sound Experience: Calling the Rain Through Sound! This immersive art installation will feature live mixing of monsoon audio by DJ Dirtyverbs and video animations by Alex! Jimenez in observance of Día de San Juan, celebrating our summer rains. The event will be held on the west bank of the Santa Cruz River Park underneath the Cushing Street Bridge, one night only!
At 8pm the event will also celebrate the release of the Monsoon Mixtape, a new compilation of original songs by local artists incorporating rain audio recorded last summer. Featured musicians include Chezale, Karima Walker, Pineross, KP Madman, Mattea and Cazo. The Mixtape, commissioned and organized by Alex!, is available on Tucson Water’s YouTube Channel as a playlist.
June 4 show @ Groundworks
Three Sisters with Red Herring Puppets
Red Herring Puppets is an incredible puppet company based here in Tucson. Our first big collaboration was for the All Souls Procession in November 2021. I recorded, arranged, and mixed the music for Three Sisters, an original song by Red Herring in which each sister represents birth, life, and death. Lisa Sturz, the head puppeteer, lent me a 100 year old bowl back mandolin which can be heard in the arrangement. We recently just finished recording the soundtrack for Red Herring’s original show UGLY, which debuted in March 2022.
Silvery night (A Lullaby)
Silvery Night was written on a cold and cozy wintery night. Dedicated to my niece Paulina and to all of the little ones and parents who could use a good night sleep.
Pineross 