Her soulful voice, chill beats and crocodile smile makes you love her. She's Toronto's shining star of TRIP-HOP.
TripHop is a complicated field of music...it's chill, it's relaxing, it's the kind of music that suits many different occasions..sittin back on a hot summer evening...hangin with friends in the middle of the afternoon...hell, a lot of it is referred to as sex music...and, well..yeah, I'll roll with that conclusion. Whatever you do to it, it's one of those kinds of music where the lyrics can mean so much to you, they can hit you deep inside and resonate with a part of you that you might not have known longed for that kind of exposure...or the smooth, chill beats can slide you away so there's nothing you can do but smile...
Maybe it's just a small world. Especially in a music scene like the one in Toronto, Canada. More likely the "six degrees of separation" just caught up with them. Either way, one lucky day, through a friend of a friend, Esthero and Doc met. From that "first cup of tea," the avalanche that became the debut album "Breath From Another" started snow-balling one note at a time into reality. We all know what opposites do to one another and these two polar opposites couldn't seem to stop themselves. From two musical worlds in conflict, they became one and created an entire universe inhabited only by the unique sounds that are Esthero.
Leaving the security of her family in a smaller than small southern Ontario town at the age of 16, Esthero always kept her flaming red-head together despite her struggles to support herself in Toronto. Too young, too pure and too driven to allow any downward spiral to suck out her boundless energy, Esthero found all the strength she needed in her music. To quote the girl herself: "Music was the lamb that made a lion out of me." Esthero spent much of her time dreaming, sneaking into clubs, scribbling out her lyrics and sharing her indescribable voice with any willing ear. Until meeting Doc, the apex of her musical career was open-mic night at a local folk club.
Yin to Yang, partner Doc's destiny flowed along the Mississippi and on the St. Paul side of the Twin Cities. Following the path of another local boy (often referred to by a symbol), Doc fell hard for the guitar and was riffing his funky brains out in local bands from the age of 15. Studio obsessed and a perfectionist to a fault, Doc swallowed knowledge at an alarming rate and became a proficient engineer and programming wizard. Accidents will happen; the boy won a free trip to the Great White North to see the World Series and fell in love with Toronto. In no time Doc finagled his dual citizenship into a complete relocation. He plunged head-long into a music community where "urban music" means a jumbled blur of hiphop, triphop, acid jazz, r&b, reggae and ska. A musical home at last!
Who knows how we choose who we choose. With little in common and less to lose, a new union was born from their first meeting. Esthero pushed her agenda of structureless, shoe-gazer, U.K. lo-fi, anti-hero pop. Doc formed order from chaos, married beats to chords they never imagined loving and with the patience of a saint, tamed the fire-breathing Esthero's passion. They formed a new synergy where violence is vulnerability, reason is abstraction, a lover's caress hides a knife, alienation bears the seeds of unity and the soothing song of a woman-child is carried aloft on the wings of a madman's music.
The album, recorded primarily in Doc's studio (apartment, that is), started down an "indie" road and traveled one song at a time. The sounds that became "Breath From Another" were invented as a dialogue with each new track a conversation with the last and each new lyric an effort to get in the last word. The duo's diverse musical friends came together to round out the ensemble. The boundaries were pushed further back as modern rock-heads discovered their common language with the hiphop nation.
"Music was the lamb that made me the LION"
Esthero blur's thelines to greatness. Her Trip-hop styles have placed her in history as a kickass musician, singer and Torontonian.
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