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Paradise Island

MusicBlog

"jettt laggg"

Location: San Francisco

Website: http://www.myspace.com/jennyhoystonparadiseisland

Bio: Begun over ten years ago in small-town Michigan, Paradise Island is now a California dream in sound and performance. With Paradise Island, Jenny Hoyston has ... (more) abandoned the hyperactive pop music kinetically spat out by her other main musical project, Erase Errata, choosing instead to explore and create with the barest elements of solo musical experimentation. Taking the dark, psychedelic sound of 1960's San Francisco as her starting point, Hoyston uses a vast array of instruments and musical genres to create songs that whisper of the passage of time, the temptations of love, and her own journey to a higher consciousness. Paradise Island has been described as haunting, intimate, and unavoidably intense. Self-recorded entirely on four track, the songs betray Hoyston's analogue sensibilities, her love of bluegrass, folk and country, a background in gospel music, and a life of revelatory mind-expansion.

Hoyston's instrumentation includes an unprogrammable and outdated Mattel drum machine, an organ played by John Lee Hooker, a ukulele with curative powers, an electric guitar bought for her as a child in Southeast Texas, and a best friend called the acoustic guitar. With these tools she has created innovative and unique soundscapes that disconnect, digress, get lost, and follow tangents to another, perhaps unearthly, world of boundless, musical freedom. This world, where Sun Ra and Steve Earle party with Alan Vega under the towering palm trees of a tropical Eden, where Joni Mitchell and Grace Slick shoot guns and drink white lightening in rural Iowa, where ecstasy and art and love is the state of mind, is Paradise Island.

Paradise Island has toured throughout the country, playing shows with such fellow travelers as The Gossip, XBXRX, Devendra Barnhart, Gravytrain, Cobra Killer, Ted Leo, King Cobra, El Guapo, Christina Billotte, and Dynasty. Hoyston's live shows are spontaneous and surprising, ranging from delicate acoustic sets to hour-long noise skronks, from sharp and danceable electro beats to powerful emotive ballads, from sober quips to drunken, blazing ramblings.

Hoyston lives in Oakland, California with her girlfriend, Lisa. Current and past musical projects include Erase Errata (vocals, trumpet), California Lightning (vocals, guitar), Anxious Rats (vocals w/ Kim Gordon), FF, Girls in Trouble, Subtonix, Day 28, and Titty Sandals. Hoyston is also a guest trumpet player on the upcoming King Cobra album. (less)