Michael Feuerstack is a songwriter, musician, and producer based in Montréal, QC. In his nearly 3 decades-long presence in the musical world, he has penned a deluge of records, collaborated with countless internationally renowned talents, and impressed those who encounter his work with his curiosity, musicality, and agility across genres. Feuerstack’s solo career (formerly under the name Snailhouse) comprises a collection of songs that simultaneously comfort and confront. In both lyrics and music, Feuerstack seamlessly passes from traditional to experimental – revealing a willingness to engage in both contemporary and traditional forms. His explorations have resulted in a staggering body of work, beloved to many. His varied ongoing pursuits reflect a relentless appetite for growth, and a responsiveness to change, as well as a respect for the greats. In all of this, Feuerstack strikes a musical balance that pays the highest respect to the listener.
Feuerstack’s current and past artistic partnerships include composition and instrumental contributions to Bell Orchestre, Julie Doiron and the Wooden Stars, the Luyas, and many more. For this work he has earned two Junos and a number of other accolades. He is equally known for his collaborative work with choreographers and filmmakers and for producing and mixing albums for both internationally regarded artists as well as for young artists emerging on the scene. Feuerstack is first and foremost a true artist. He is a tireless creator, collaborator, a seeker of stories to tell, and new ways to tell them.
About the latest album Harmonize the Moon
Why don’t you stay/and throw stones in the lake?/Time’s an illusion/the waves barely moving/slowly enough to forget where we were…
What better place to begin the story of Michael Feuerstack’s fifth full-length record than at its end? With Harmonize the Moon, the Montreal songwriter returns to the gentle sparseness that made up the majority of his first album, Tambourine Death Bed (2013), since dropping his Snailhouse moniker. It may be closing a loop or opening one — or, more accurately, both — depending on the moment you look. As Feuerstack reminds us on the album’s dreamy final track, “Why Don’t You Stay?,” time is an illusion. So why not stick around? All over Harmonize the Moon, the nature of that illusion is incredibly elastic. Some moments seem to stretch on forever; others are illuminated only briefly, like fiery embers popping into the sky, extinguished just as quickly as they’re recognized.
While Feuerstack arranged and recorded Harmonize the Moon completely solo at his apartment in the spring of 2020, the songs that compose it were written over the past couple years, on wanderings and tours as well as at home. He embarked on a slow process of balancing the poetic with the narrative, producing songs that flow naturally instead of adhering too rigidly to established forms. The result is a collection that’s pensive but playful, introspective yet generous, and achingly intimate. Snippets of conversation and noise — the sonic fragments, both manipulated and natural, swirling around Feuerstack’s life as he recorded the album — are often employed as the connective tissue between songs, heightening its seeking feelings, highly personal but plucked from public life. They’re not random, but they’re not not random — kids in the alley behind his house make noise; announcements crackle over the intercoms on trains from Chicago to Warsaw.
The tone is tentatively hopeful throughout. Over deliberately thrummed acoustic guitar and minimal drums, Feuerstack moves slowly and with intention, rendering his transmissions in intimate arrangements and his warm, expressive voice. He conversationally acknowledges the unpredictable courses of existence (“I Used to be a Singer”), the qualities of liminal spaces (“In The Waiting Room”), and sends an ode out to the weary, the tired, “the weak and the uninspired” (“Call of the Tired”). Flourishes of eerie electric guitar brighten the darkness on “Bathed In Light,” and, over the earthy sweetness of the title track, Feuerstack makes the case for allowing oneself to ebb and flow like the ocean tides — to embrace the strange harmonies of being. Big questions about transformation, adaptation, and acceptance float easy on airy, lilting melodies, drifting through a mesmerizing landscape of myriad sonic and emotional textures.
Harmonize the Moon was mastered by Philip Shaw Bova and features artwork by Paul Henderson. It will be released in spring 2021 through Forward Music Group everywhere people listen to music.
(Bio en Français)
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“a national treasure.” – Globe & Mail
“heaving and gorgeous…anguishing and contemplative.” – Stereogum
“one of this country’s most talented songwriters.” – Exclaim!
“simultaneously heartfelt and apathetic, sacred and profane.” – CBC Music
“slow, gentle songs of love and truth and unforgettable regrets.” – NOW Toronto
“Beautiful and patient, this record is the result of years Mike spent practicing his craft and being forced to question if the struggle is worth it. It’s written for love of art and life, a back porch whisper that could float in the wind.” – Hero Hill
“It’s all in the songwriting, always his forte, and stronger than ever.” – Bob Mersereau
“He possesses a gently haunting vocal style and injects aural adventurousness into wellcrafted and pensively atmospheric songs.” – New Canadian Music
“Wonderfully fragile, heart-wrenchingly powerful… Feuerstack cuts through your veins and bones like an arctic shower, an icy-clean rinse for the soul.” – Beatroute
“…a serendipitous gift: an overheard revelation, a fleeting view from [Feuerstack’s] perspective, a profound truth.” – The Grid