Kyrie Kristmanson

Carleton singer makes big on break

Written by Lauren Jankowski
Thursday, 29 March 2007

Kyrie Kristmanson is a first-year Carleton student who turned her interest in people, her zest for life and her passion for arts into a musical career.

The vibrant 17-year-old alternative singer-songwriter ardently says her love of singing began at an early age.

“It was always sort of a natural source of joy and a coping mechanism to deal with stressful situations,” she says.

She was also playing the guitar by age nine and the trumpet by 11.

Kristmanson got her break when she auditioned for the Winnipeg Folk Festival at age 15. She was given a backstage pass and performed her music professionally for the first time.

“I was happy that I had been chosen,” she says. “It was one of my first opportunities to play for a bigger audience.”

Kristmanson released her first album, The Kyrie K Groove, last year. It is self-produced to sound live and is titled after the trio she recorded with.

Her second album is due out early this summer, and she says she is excited for its new direction and sound.

“I hope as I get older I get better,” she says, explaining that her new songs have matured just as she has.

Kristmanson says her interests and experiences greaty influence her as a singer-songwriter, such as how university has impacted her music.

“In a way [school and music] really complement one another,” she says.

As a Carleton humanities student, Kristmanson says her course material often turns into songs. For example, the track “Origin of Stars” is a song about the story of Isaac and Abraham that Kristmanson once studied in class.

She says she often finds parallels between school and everyday life that colour her music.
As for balancing singing and studying, she says it just happens naturally.

“It never feels really like a sacrifice,” she says. “It’s just like anything else, you catch up.”

The young musician also says her background is important to her songwriting. Trilingual in English, French and Spanish, Kristmanson sings and writes in all three. She has also lived in Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Saskatchewan and England.

At age 15 she wrote The Kyrie K Groove in Saskatchewan while “trying to forge some kind of relationship with the strange and beautiful land.”

Kristmanson says she is passionate about the role of the “human experience” in her music. “The arts bring beauty to day-to-day experience.”

Kristmanson is positive about her career and says she has a lot of family support and opportunities to perform. She recently performed at Canadian Music Week in Toronto, and has upcoming gigs at The Black Sheep Inn in May and the Ottawa Jazz Festival in June.

Kristmanson says it is a start, but admits there is still a long way to go.
"The career is really young," she says. "I don't want to jinx it." - The Charlatan - Carleton's Independent Newspaper

The Kyrie K Groove packs a punch
Written by Lauren Jankowski
Thursday, 05 April 2007
The Kyrie K Groove
The Kyrie K Groove
[Unsigned]

The Kyrie K Groove cannot be found in most stores and neither can its sound. It occupies a niche of its own within alternative music.
Bass player Sam McLellan, trumpeter Nigel Taylor and vocalist-guitarist Kyrie Kristmanson have a unique, raw and mature sound on the 2006 album.

Each song has its own flavour. The tracks vary between a folk or jazz feel to a cultural twist with English and French lyrics.

The trio's musical stylings flourish in songs like "Eruption!," an upbeat, catchy track with spunk and punch. You'll be singing it to class after you hear it.

That said, different combinations of trumpet, bass, guitar and vocals sound a little hollow in places. While recorded to sound live, some songs sound unfinished.

So it's funny then that "Song for a Black Wind," an acappella track by Kristmanson, accompanied only by cricket sounds, is one of the most dauntingly powerful tracks on the album. The slow, heart clenching song could be an ancient lullaby.

The Kyrie K Groove definitely has something.

The album is a mix of different tastes and trials, some that work and others that need work. But listen for yourself - it hits a level no mainstream music has yet reached. - The Charlatan - Carleton's Independent Newspaper

I'm not entirely sure where you can pick up a copy of The Kyrie K Groove, the debut album from Kyrie Kristmanson, since her MySpace says that it's only available at the two Compact Music stores in Ottawa, but after listening to the album obsessively for the last month or so, all I can say is this: find a way to get it. Write to the stores, write to Kristmanson via her MySpace, check your favourite file-sharing service hourly, whatever. All that matters is that you somehow obtain this album.

How does it sound? think Feist crossed with Ella Fitzgerald crossed with Joanna Newsome crossed with Madeleine Peyroux, and you'll have a pretty good idea. Of course, like anyone really worth hearing, Kristmanson incorporates all of those artists into her sound without being overly indebted to any of them. She scats (on "Symmetry"), she writes pop songs with super-catchy choruses ("Eruption!), she sings in French oh-so-alluringly (Oh Montmartre), she shows an experimental side (the twenty-minute-long eigth track, the name of which I can't make out in the liner notes), she sings a chilling acapella lullabye (Song For A Blackwind), and she never sounds anything less than astonishing at any point in time. There's really nothing else to say about The Kyrie K Groove, other than this: buy it now. - i (heart) music

She calls herself a nomad, who has lived by the ocean, on the open prairie and in Canada's biggest cities.

For most of her 18 years, Kyrie Kristmanson says she's been an observer of people, and always curious to discover the sights, sounds and stories that make a place what it is.

And when asked what prompted her to pursue music, she talks about a life-long passion to "forge a relationship with the land and its history."

It's an unexpected answer, but one that seems fitting from an artist who is herself so unconventional, yet engaging.

With her voice, her guitar, and her trumpet, the petite musician creates a wallop of sound that's a combination of folk, jazz, rock and world music, or what she calls "modern folk".

"I've been playing the guitar since I was nine, and I think I was singing before I could talk," says Kristmanson . "My musical style wasn't a conscious decision, it was of just the way it happened and I guess it's a calling or something because I can't think of anything else I would rather be doing."

When she was 15, she had her first big performance at the Winnipeg Folk Festival, and has since established a solid reputation as a performer in Saskatchewan, where she most recently lived. But a musicians with a nomadic lifestyle also carries the burden of starting over in each new city. While that would probably seem daunting to many singers, Kristmanson tackled Ottawa head-on when she arrived here last fall for school, performing at open-stages and making contact with established artists and club owners.

In the last few months alone, she's performed at numerous city venues, both as a solo act and with other musicians, and it's all been a nice warm-up for her next big festival gig - an afternoon concert that's part of the Jazz Festival's Youth Series. "My plan is to have a really tight and well-timed set, that involves the audience. I am very excited about it," Kristmanson explains.

All it took to land the spot in the festival lineup was a quick e-mail to organizers inviting them to hear what she does best - tell a refreshing musical tale of all the places she's been and all the people she's met.

- Kim Mannix Vermette - Metro

Creating a personal make-up for a place outside of its traditional historical significance can make the environment more hospitable and welcoming, a fact not lost on Kyrie Kristmanson, Regina native, folk singer/songwriter, and self-professed nomad.

"For me to like living in a place," says Kristmanson, "I have to have read the poetry that comes from it, and know about the history. I live in Ottawa right now which is the nation's capital and has the houses of Parliament. It's easy to know about the history of the capital. But I did read some novels by Brian Doyle that were about Ottawa and its early years. That makes the place meaningful."

Kristmanson, who has spent the past year at university in Ontario, has never been afraid to share that meaning. Wheter with her solo output or her previous work with local indie music purveyors Rah Rah, she has emerged as an outspoken and talented artist, all the while making music seemingly beyond her years.

While not attaching a particular ideology to her music, she won't deny that it bears the weight of a general message. "Society needs art, music and poetry as much as it needs the people making mayors accountable or making governments accountable," comments Kristmanson. "I focus more on songwriting."

"I've been thinking about it, and I think songwriting is enough."

Her spot in this year's Regina Folk Festival, which was assured after he success last year at the festival is a homecoming of sorts, as she has much new material to play for friends and family who haven't had the opportunity to watch her perform in months. The prospect of playing to these corwds is an exciting one for her, as she says that "Regina Folk Festival audiences are just vivacious" like no others.

by James Brotheridge - Prairie Dog

Kyrie Kristmanson was a total surprise; the 18-year-old Ottawa native is blessed with a seriously haunting voice, comparable maybe to a Bjork/Feist hybrid. Unusual songs, occasionally plucked on a nylon-stringed guitar, sometimes supported by double bass, and other times performed with nothing but her voice. Though how she bore the heat bedecked in a large, furry white hat is a mystery. Kristmanson is one to watch out for. - Edmonton Sun

Fateema Sayani
IN THE CLUBS
Ottawa Citizen May, 07

Make room on your favourites list for Kyrie Kristmanson. She’s the Ottawa-via-Saskatchewan teenager with the plummy accent and just the right amount of whimsy in her songs. They give you a little wow feeling.

Kristmanson, 18, is a strong a capella singer – her thigh-smacking hands and body rhythm are her best accompaniment, thanks to a voice that is intense without begin odd. Think of the meshy, partially pronounced utterings of Feist, the glacial soul of Emiliana Torrini (those two share a love of big, furry hats) and the pixie allure of Björk and you’ll get an idea of her voice.

She mixes that with a plink-plunk soundtrack of Spanish guitar, trumpet and upright bass. She fingerpicks her guitar in a percussive manner and uses her fingernails on the strings to make punctuating scratches.

On the song Eruption, she’ll prompt the audience, singing, “There has been an eruption – pow!” The listeners then fill in the rest of the “pows” for the song’s duration.

Audiences will get a chance to “pow” when Kristmanson plays Sunday at the Electric Gallery, next Thursay at the Black Sheep Inn and later this summer at the jazz festival.

Kristmanson came to Ottawa in September to study humanities at Carleton. They’re a class of live-in-your-head types who aspire to be activists and poets rather than pursuing more vocationally motivated streams.

The musings from classics, religion and philosophy leak their way into songs like Origin of Stars. Kristmanson also works in other old-soul renderings: She likes digging up archival NFB films, reading old-edition folk biographies at teahouses, and loitering around Ian Kimmerley Stamps on Spark Street. She’ll tell you about the screaming silence of the prairies or the paradoxical character of a province.

Quiet musings aside, Kristmanson says her natural environment is the stage – and she’s graced plenty of them since her school year began. She’s warmed up smaller cafés like Rasputin’s and Nostalgica, and played for fans of As the Poets Affirm, sharing a Zaphod’s bill with the band.

Her goal?

“As a songwriter, I constantly try to find what’s striking a nerve and balance that with what’s universal in a particular experience. It’s often a really loaded place to live.”

Kyrie Kristmanson opens for Chris Yang and Richard Laviolette at the Electric Gallery, 30 Marier Ave., Vanier, Sunday at 7 p.m.
- Fateema Sayani, Ottawa Citizen

At the Savannah Room, Kyrie Kristmanson, who has lived all over Canada, wore a white furry hat, blew her trumpet like a bugler calling for reinforcements and sang plain modal songs that seemed to have been scratched onto stone tablets. There's something dark and primitive (in the best sense) in her music, even when she's being playful, and her opaque soprano sounds like something only generations of isolation could produce. But she also had some swing in her step in a song about "pagan love" accompanied by off-beat finger snaps. The friendlier she got, the odder she seemed, and as she played song after song with bassist Martain Pearson, I wondered whether her strange art developed in spite of what we think of as normal life, or because of it.

- Robert Everett-Green, The Globe and Mail, March 8, 2008 - by Robert Everett-Green for The Globe and Mail

With an owlish lyrical concentration that recalls early Leonard Cohen and recent Joanna Newsom, and only in her teens, singer-guitarist and trumpeter Kyrie Kristmanson certainly has something of the prodigy in her style, but a childhood of growing up all over Canada and beyond appears to have given her enough of an independent spirit that she seems to be trying to impress herself, not anyone else. She take obvious delight in seeing what her voice, fingers and mind can do, and rightly so, as the results are melodic and affecting - but most of all they make one eager to hear what she'll be making five years from now, when experience lends her sensibility a little ripeness. - Carl Wilson for the Globe and Mail

With no prior expectations, Kyrie Kristmanson blew me away. Her diminutive stature belies great talent and a charmingly quirky personality. Looking the part of her Björk influences in a fuzzy white cap, Kyrie’s fluent French labelled her a local instead of the Icelandic transport her largely a cappella music suggested. Her musical accompaniment was a male vocalist, harmonising and occasionally beatboxing or contributing finger snaps. On a couple occasions, Kyrie strapped on a classical guitar for some fiercely complex and groovy finger picking, answering the question of what Björk would sound like if she was a swamp-boogie queen with jazz training. - Scott A. Gray for Exclaim!