Bowerbirds

Basia Bulat is a singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist from Toronto who has found acclaim for her exuberant live show, soulful voice and well-crafted songs. She is in the final days of finishing her third album. It was recorded at a Royal Canadian Legion dance hall in The Beaches of Toronto and at the Arcade Fire Church in Quebec and will be released in 2013.

Having been nominated for a Juno (Canadian Grammy) and short-listed for Polaris, Bulat has shared the stage with such notable bands as The National, St Vincent, Beirut, Tuneyards, Arcade Fire, Andrew Bird and Nick Cave. She was invited to help fête Leonard Cohen and perform one of his songs at famed Massey Hall on the occasion of his Glenn Gould Prize.

Midtown Dickens began as a ragtag, learn-while-you-play duo of best friends Kym Register and Catherine Edgerton. The project was born in the post-industrial blues town of Durham, NC when the pair began collecting orphaned instruments from generous friends and back alley dumpsters. They developed an unrefined brand of punk-folk that drew from old time bluegrass and the anti-folk minimalism of the Pacific Northwest. Eager to include more friends in the project, the pair rallied a DIT (Do-It-Together) front-porch collective of players who shared instruments such as the banjo, accordion, musical saw, trumpet, trombone, guitar, drums, mandolin, upright bass, harmonica, glockenspiel, spoons, and whatever else was lying around. The band soon solidified into a cohesive quintet, embarking on a darker and more extensive exploration of folk music, while still rooted in the earnest songwriting of Kym and Catherine.