September 23, 2018 | 5:30 PM

Chris Lynch and the Dust of the Suns Eventide Release with Lucy Michelle

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Chris Lynch and the Dust of Suns

Eventide is the second collection of delicate instrumental miniatures by Chris Lynch with the
Dust of Suns Ensemble, this time working in collaboration with the photographer Hannah Lynch.
Though the piano-led group resembles a chamber quartet, they’re playing popular music, but pop
whose touchstones mainly predate rock of the sort Lynch grew up with and has most
prominently performed.

On Eventide and its predecessor, Dreams for Hannah, Lynch draws on bal-musette—French
accordion music springing from fin de siècle bars and between-the-wars bohemian cafés—as
well as Erik Satie, classic American and French film scores, music boxes, lullabies, klezmer, and
a few irrepressible harmonies and melodies redolent of the pop-rock Lynch loves with equal
enthusiasm. Though Lynch writes all the music and guides the group’s sensibility, the
arrangements are worked out collectively with harpist Phala Tracy, cellist Anna Lee Roberts, and
upright bassist and producer John Munson, best known for his work in Semisonic, the New
Standards, and Trip Shakespeare. In addition to working collaboratively with the other
musicians, Lynch wrote these latest pieces as a companion to a series of twilit color images by
his wife Hannah, an accomplished photographer with a particular gift for portraiture and urban
naturalism. Her series, also called Eventide, often depicts preteens in the distended, lightly
supervised late afternoons and early evenings of summer. One of the shots from the series is
featured on the album’s cover, and a limited-edition photobook can be purchased in tandem with
the ten-inch vinyl album, which is also available as a digital download.

Eventide’s ten short, hummable pieces—Lynch is right to call them songs—are mostly waltzes,
though the wistful title track and a few stray measures are in common time. Lynch maintains the
dominant three-four pulse with frequently arpeggiated left-hand chords and keeps his right-hand
melodies lyrical and relatively simple. These are gentle, expressive pieces—though they derive
from different sources, they sometimes bear a kinship with Chick Corea’s Children’s Songs.
While there’s a charming sepia tone to the project, it doesn’t feel reproductive; this is
idiosyncratic, living music, evocative as background (“furniture music,” as Satie put it) but
worthy of close attention. As with Dreams for Hannah, the album was recorded live—with very
little overdubbing and editing, that is—to analog tape.

A multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter, Lynch has been performing in Minneapolis-based
groups since the 1980s. He first attracted notice as frontman for the Picadors, a crafty pop-rock
five-piece that also included brothers Adam and Noah Levy, who would go on to form the
Honeydogs. In the mid-’90s, Lynch resurfaced with Eller Lynch, a sometimes augmented pop-
folk duo co-led by the versatile John Eller, with whom Lynch has reunited for his current rock
project, the Shiny Lights. By day, Lynch is a clinical specialist for Medtronic. Hannah is an in-
house photographer for a health-care company and works independently as an art photographer
and portraitist. They live in Minneapolis with their son, Mick, the subject of the album’s cover image.

Sunday, September 23, 2018

Doors: 5:30 PM

Show: 6:30 PM

Tickets: AA, $15

2836 Lyndale Ave. S. Minneapolis, MN 55428

All ticket sales are final. 

Email events@arcstone.com with any questions.

Purchase Tickets Here!