Sluice & Fust with Sleeper’s Bell

Sluice
Sluice is the recording project of Durham based musician/engineer Justin Morris (Fust, Weirs, Aunt Sis). Radial Gate, the second release as Sluice, features a wide collection of local talent including Avery Sullivan (Fust, Indigo De Souza), Oliver Child-Lanning (Fust, Weirs), Luke Norton (HC McEntire), Frank Meadows (Fust, Tomberlin, Bellows) and Natalie King (Toss) to name a few. Radial Gate continues the Sluice theme of nature’s intersection with industry, and lyrically explores the ideas of isolation and depression giving way to community and personal growth. “Could you pass me a beer, oh no it fell in the river. Hey man that’s all right, goodnight.”

Fust

Fust is the songwriting project of Aaron Dowdy, and a Durham NC based alt-country band formed in 2018 currently touring in support of Genevieve, their sophomore album on Dear Life Records.

Fust’s first record Evil Joy was a self-described bitter domestic drama obsessed with the kitchen-sink passage of time measured by moments of leaving, returning, leaving, and returning. With Genevieve, we find a different kind of leaving: leaving behind, leaving one’s old ways, starting anew, a small life together, in “Family Country.” Thus, Genevieve: an historical name for both the saintly and the ordinary, the peasantry and the family, the community and the wife, extreme devotion and absolute forbearance.

While sonically and instrumentally louder than Evil Joy, Genevieve is thematically more quiet about its pains—more settled in its ways. It is a collection of pathetic love stories written in dedication to “small life,” moving from gentle exceptions (“I can take the late hours if you’re with me”) to pitiful admissions (“I’m never going to change when I leave…”). What comes with a quiet life? The highest forms of beauty, but we also find here songs of unspeaking companions, the sublime dread of having children, the balance of humility and humiliation, playing the fool for the greater good, and… budget birthday parties.

There’s some strange, unnameable beauty swimming beneath the surface in the music of Sleeper’s Bell, the Chicago-based folk duo of singer-songwriter Blaine Teppema and guitarist Evan Green. 

A librarian by trade, Teppema has always harbored a deep love for reading; there were never entire books that made her feel new so much as there were sentences, even phrases or fragments, that felt like incantations. It’s this transfixing quality that Teppema aims to recreate in her own music. The songs she writes aren’t as much about anything as they are spells to ward off the regressive impulses of nostalgia. As a self-described “deeply sentimental person,” writing these songs is Teppema’s way of quelling growing pains

The new songs, to be released soon, are a full-band effort of pure love.  Teppema and Green are joined by their friends Leo Paterniti on bass and Ethan Toenjes on drums.