Brian Thurber presents Texas swing or contest style fiddling which has its roots in the juke joints and roadhouses of the pre WWII southwest. Many of the basic melodies go back hundreds of years, but the chords that back up the tunes are modern swing chords. He also includes bluegrass, Celtic and contra dance music. Brian Thurber studied classical violin and started playing bluegrass and old fiddle tunes when he moved to Whatcom County in the 1970s. He has played in several local groups and currently plays with Katz and Dogz and the Dunton Sisters.
Gray’s early music was in a contemporary folk-rock, singer-songwriter mode; his primary instrument was acoustic guitar, with occasional piano. 1996’s Sell, Sell, Sell featured some rock arrangements and electric instrumentation. Starting with the release of White Ladder, Gray began to make significant use of computer-generated music to accompany his voice and acoustic instrumentation, a technique which differentiates him from many of his peers. A New Day At Midnight continued this direction, although lyrically it was darker in tone than White Ladder and the instrumentation much more downbeat.
Sufjan Stevens mixes autobiography, religious fantasy, and regional history to create folk songs of grand proportions. A preoccupation with epic concepts has motivated two state records (Michigan & Illinois), an electronic album for the animals of the Chinese zodiac (Enjoy Your Rabbit), a five-disc Christmas box set (Songs for Christmas), and, more recently, a programmatic tone poem with film accompaniment for the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, a large-scale ensemble piece commissioned by BAM in 2007.
