Chelsea Jade Announces Nationwide Homecoming Tour
Los Angeles-based performance artist and singer-songwriter – Chelsea Jade – has announced an eight show nationwide tour.
Chelsea will be bringing her unique and captivating brand of dream-pop to Hamilton, Auckland, Wellington, Napier, Christchurch and Dunedin over the coming months. For six of those shows, she will be supported by hypnotising newcomer deryk.
”Dear All,
These announcement broadcasts usually take a familiar shape on my end – in an nth hour harried state, I comb through my last and oft-neglected bio screed and recalibrate it as if I’m a deeply impressed (!) third party narrator. While I understand the utility, I have to be honest, it never feels quite right!
So, little theatrics aside, I spent the lion’s share of 2020 in my Los Angeles apartment hunkering down ad infinitum. All tours canceled, everything in flux. I’m sure you’ve seen the news. Still, golden moments showed up in little ways. Getting lovely notes from Bandcamp Friday patrons, cleaning my apartment to that incredible Jessie Ware record and frankly, being invited to play in my hometown this year. I’m grateful to have made it through. It’s an immense privilege to be in a space where music can exist as viscerally as it was intended to be and I would be deeply honored if you would join me for these shows.
Your emotional wreck forever,
Chelsea Jade
P.s – I guess I almost finished a new record too.”
Banished Music & Under The Radar presents:
CHELSEA JADE – NZ TOUR 2021
with special guest deryk
February 14 – Big Gay Out, Auckland
(without deryk)
February 24 – Hamilton Gardens Arts Festival**
March 17 – Auckland Arts Festival***
March 19 – Meow, Wellington*
March 20 – Paisley Stage, Napier*
March 26 – Blue Smoke, Christchurch*
March 27 – Dive, Dunedin*
April 3 – Peachy Keen, Basin Reserve, Wellington
(without deryk)
*Tickets on sale from Banished Music, 9am Monday January 18
ABOUT CHELSEA JADE
With a focus on literate lyricism, Chelsea Jade harnesses an art school approach through her low impact, high drama vocal performance and lateral visual sensibilities. In short, Chelsea immediately captivates. Her critically acclaimed debut album Personal Best featured the singles ‘Low Brow’, ‘Life of the Party’, ‘Ride or Cry’, ‘High Beam’ and ‘Laugh It Off’.
Auckland raised, she began as a dancer and gravitated towards music early on, falling in love with the conversation between the ballet pianist and her own movement.
Eventually being caught between the high concept world of art school and a romance with the immediacy of pop music, Chelsea abandoned her studies in the middle of exams and fled to New York for a series of writing sessions with Justyn Pilbrow (The Neighbourhood), eventually landing in her new home base of Los Angeles, California.
In the subsequent five years, Chelsea has written for other artists (Chainsmokers, Cxloe) and toured with the likes of Muna, Jai Wolf and Yoursmith. An advocate for women in the producer hotseat, Chelsea had the pleasure of curating Songhubs Sphere, 2018 writing camp initiative with APRA which focussed solely on women and non-binary creators. In 2020, Chelsea spent the year working on other people’s projects remotely and finishing a new full length record for release in 2021.
“I have always been a DIY artist, from collecting field recordings, toiling over graphic design and video treatments. I’m determined to indulge the texture of DIY industriousness. My fingerprints are often the only ones present and I won’t be sanding them smooth any longer”
The multiple APRA NZ Silver Scroll Award nominee is known for delivering outstanding, intelligent pop that rewards your brain and propels you towards the dance floor.
ABOUT DERYK
Slow music for fast times.
It’s all too rare to discover a new artist who doesn’t acquiesce to the current penchant for in your face treatments, instead choosing to aim squarely at your heart. 24 year old, Auckland artist, deryk is one such exception. While all around her the world moves at a dizzying pace, she manages to summon space and instil stillness in her music, as well as delivering a few surprises on her multi-layered debut EP Womb.
As for the name? deryk is a tribute to her late grandfather who was an early champion of her tuneful curiosity. Both as a link to formative years living in London, before moving to Hawkes Bay, as well as a pivotal figure in her development, it’s a good deal more than a simple project signifier.
Drawing inspiration from powerful female artists like PJ Harvey, Fiona Apple, Esperanza Spalding, Kate Bush, Joni Mitchell and Bjork, as well as her love for Bristol and its culture in the 90s, deryk has crafted her own sound that feels utterly contemporary while still retaining a hazy timeless quality. Contributing to that is production and writing spar, Justyn Pilbrow, whose extensive experience with artists like The Neighbourhood, Chelsea Jade and Halsey helped her capture her vision on Womb. The sound of deryk is unique and captivating, moulding distinctive, rhythmic vocal phrasings and visceral lyrics around craftily submerged melodies and ghostly modular tones.
Lead track ‘Call You Out’ surreptitiously rides sparse beats and rolling acoustic guitar to construct a woozy, intriguing scenario that lingers long after the song has finished. Accompanied by a lockdown necessitated, self-directed, produced and performed video – shot in her kitchen cupboards with the help of a red lamp and a delightfully distorting glass jar – Call You Out is a powerful statement of intent. MEN and Goodtimes merge soft atmospheres with sharp lines, while the colourfully vitriolic vibes on Heard It All Before summon up more emphatic textures. The vocal gymnastics of One Star house the line that carries the most resonance for deryk. ‘Irritation is all I’m faced with, I know her all too well, we share clothing’.
Womb is the culmination of her development from acoustic beginnings through to the study of music and electronic production, and now a realisation of all that in deryk, In her own words she likens the release of Womb to the ‘burial scene from Kill Bill’, when Uma is clawing her way out of the coffin, preparing to avenge. It’s fair to say deryk is only just getting started.
Slow music for fast times, space and solace amongst the confusion, a gentle reveal in the age of instant gratification, mordant lines over sumptuous melodies – deryk is something special.
