Album Notes

It’s Saturday night in Brooklyn. Far beyond the reach of the club scene, a crowd of tattooed artists, jazzheads, and DIY scenesters gather on the rooftop of an old factory out in Bushwick. It’s the home base for the suite unraveling, a band that even in the wilds of this artists’ neighborhood is entirely unique. Saxophones battle the driving drums, videos play across an old water tower, and fiery redhead Lily Maase shoulders her guitar and begins to play.

the suite unraveling is a band that doesn’t quite know what to call itself, which suits Maase just fine; “let them show up at our shows and tell us what it is,” she says. She’s focused on her music, taking her experiences – of growing up in the Southwest, of going to art school in rural Texas, of living in the belly of the urban elephant – and folding them together into fractured, impressionistic, narrative songs.

Though Maase may write the music, the band brings it to life, and her stories takes shape through close collaboration with her bandmates—saxophonists Evan Smith and Peter Van Huffel, bassist Matt Wigton and drummer Fred Kennedy. The resulting music is lively and danceable, raw yet intimate, and leaps easily from jazz to indie rock to the avant garde without losing its own sense of style.

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Born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico, guitarist, composer and mixed media artist Lily Maase now splits her creative life between Brooklyn and Montreal.
When in Brooklyn, Lily writes for and performs with her acclaimed quintet, theSuiteUnraveling, recently dubbed “seriously remarkable new music” by the Weekly Alibi; collaborates with some of New York’s top-call improvisers (Walter Thompson, Cadmium Lace, Brooklyn Soundpainting Orchestra, ZAHA); tours nationally with cocktail pop sensations the Lascivious Biddies; and dreams up large-scale mixed media projects for video, double quintet, laptop and beyond (hall.of.mirrors, CAVE 2006; re:Disconnect, Roulette 2006).
When in Montreal, Lily writes for and performs with art-rock experimenters Life Without Robots and plays regularly with percussionist Ivan Bamford. Lily is a graduate of the University of North Texas’s esteemed jazz studies program, a founding member of the Addtract Consortium, and is endorsed by Godin guitars.