Maria Somerville, Joanne Robertson

Pioneer Works presents Maria Somerville & Joanne Robertson in our Main Hall on Tuesday March 24, 2025.

By the time Irish musician Maria Somerville started writing Luster, her landmark label debut for 4AD, she had lived away from her native Connemara for quite some time. Having grown up amongst the wild, mountainous terrain of Galway’s rural west coast, she later relocated to Dublin, where she patiently developed an atmospheric dream pop signature inspired by the landscape of her youth – a spellbinding soundworld of gusting ambient electronics, ethereal guitar strums, sparse percussion, and hushed lyrical vignettes. In 2019, this culminated in All My People, a self-released LP steeped in reverb, nostalgia and a yearning for home that won praise from discerning press and listeners alike. It was upon returning to Connemara, in a house near where she was raised overlooking one of the country’s largest lakes, Lough Corrib, that work commenced on the songs that would eventually become Luster, an album that illuminates Somerville’s music anew, pushing it forward in both sound and spirit. Where All My People conveyed memories and melancholic longing with misty slowcore balladry, these 12 tracks show us an artist who’s more assured in the path her life has taken, and the person she’s become in the process. As she sings in ‘Trip’ – “I can see more clearly than I could before. I know now what's true for me.”

Joanne Robertson is a musician and painter. Joanne collaborates regularly with her friends, most recently with Dean Blunt on ‘Backstage Raver’, and Sidsel Meineche Hansen on ‘Alien Baby’. She moved to Glasgow in 2018, after having lived in London. Her painting and music both form from improvisatory moments of expression. ‘Blue Car’ is a collection of songs from her archive of unreleased solo recordings, similar to ‘Painting Stupid Girls’, these tracks attempt to record the moment, and where she was at emotionally that day, similar to diary entries. The dates she wrote these songs is unknown, they span roughly a ten year period. Upcoming solo record ‘Blurrr’ is to be released on AD 93 in 2025.

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