artist Himalayan Bear

Himalayan Bear - ...Attacks The Brilliant Air Soundsect.com “There’s a dull sense of anticipation in the air. Two lovers’ eyes meet and they hold glances for what seems like an eternity, but is probably no more than a few seconds. In those precious moments, there’s a sense of worlds colliding. Such an innocent act could hold no value for most, but for these two, there’s almost something remarkably tangible about this gaze. There’s a certain lust there, that goes without saying, but somehow each can grasp something more. Somehow there is a shared understanding of what attraction compels them to one another, and the sheer joy they derive from each other’s company. Closing the distance between them, their lips meet.” The last three and a half minutes of “A Light Grows Brighter” are kinda like that. On his second album, The Himalayan Bear (aka Ryan Beattie) strips his songs to the barest of bones: most tracks are constructed of sparse guitars and charming rhythms that allow his falsetto to shine. Upon repeated listens there are numerous standouts. “The Captain”, in particular, shows of Beattie’s ability to sing with remarkable appeal. It’s here that his timbre reaches the sort of passion with which Jeff Buckley crooned. The restrained churning of “Sounds Are Birds” shines at its finest when Beattie whispers, “Though there’s shelter in your love, there’s an ache in your head”. The deceivingly morbid “The City Wind” changes dynamics with a guile beauty few can pull off. Meanwhile, “Lo, Lonesome Island” (which is also the title of his first album) seems to pull discordant strings into a mesmerizing account of seaside procrastination. However, Beattie’s finest moment comes six minutes into the second track, “A Light Grows Brighter”, when he utters, “I want to hear you for the first time again” before slyly picking up the pace and singing, “Lines they might stray/ But blood stays the same.” You’ll have no idea what the hell he’s talking about, but you’ll think it’s gorgeous nonetheless.

Himalayan Bear Attacks the Brilliant Air: best album name of the year? Oh, and the music isn’t bad either Grizzly, Panda, Polar…musicians with bear monikers are somewhat in vogue at the moment, creating often beautiful, experimental and refreshing music. Ryan Beattie, aka Himalayan Bear, has taken time out from the day job as guitarist of Frog Eyes to release a second solo effort and add his significant talents to the bear collective. With a damaged and wistful tone, Beattie’s voice ranges from deeply resonant to delicate falsetto in an instant (as on the tender The Lost Love), augmented by soft tremolo guitar, swooning backing vocals and touches of ukulele. As if this wasn’t enough, lyrics of poetic beauty find their way through the sad dissonances and carefully tumbling rhythms. On The Captain, the listener is told: “as a Himalayan bear attacks the brilliant air…the sun felt good on your sweater. Piano strings don’t break under tension”. So evocative; abstract images conjured in so few words. A melancholy pleasure to listen to, followed by a creeping sadness at its completion: the only solution is to keep listening.

MONDOmagazine Review By Allana Mayer I'll get this out of the way: The Himalayan Bear is the new Devendra Banhart. A Canadian one, no less, and with enough cred to last you a good month of name-droppery. Sounding like so many acoustic-strumming, eerily-wailing brethren, Ryan Beattie (tour guitarist of Frog Eyes, leader of Chet, and musician-about-Victoria, BC) enlists a troupe of like-minded individuals to assist on his second album attempt. The first, Lo, Lonesome Island, was ukulelean pop, loosely gathered on the theme of Hawaii. For ... Attacks the Brilliant Air, the old soul that is Beattie has created epics, desolate yet optimistic, most spanning past the five-minute mark. The earlier stuff is somehow both darker and more innocent than this new release, like the writings of an angry adolescent versus an experienced and dignified retiree. It's mystifying that the kindly, bespectacled grandfather persona of The Himalayan Bear shares a tour van with a character as frenetic as Frog Eyes' Carey Mercer. As diehard about Frog Eyes as I am for any band (that is to say, some of their stuff I'll always like), their recent work has left me soured. I wanted the energy, the creepiness, but without losing the craftsmanship. Unfortunately, there's been too much weak repetition of the same old themes, a stagnation. Luckily, The Himalayan Bear refreshes our awareness of the intelligence that's known to dwell inside those unassuming figures of west coast music. What's more, he manages to put a spin on it that warms your insides — and does it without even breaking a sweat. Over the eight minutes of "The City Wind," he manages to squeeze out lines like "The smoke from your gun has stained your soul with the smell of death" as sweetly as a serenade to a lost love. Coincidentally, in "The Lost Love," he seems to be celebrating a long-dead summer romance, with castanets, a slow mambo rhythm, and not so much as a tear shed (despite what the lyrics may say). Not only has Beattie portrayed a wisdom beyond his years, he also shows talent in the art of misdirection, as his melancholy lyrics contrast his cheery melodies without ever creating conflict. Piddly bits of gospel-church organ or shuffled snare-brushing in the background create just enough theme and setting to conjure the image of a hushed audience, seated in the Music Gallery or a similar venue, respectfully awed by the lone figure onstage. His face probably hidden by long hair, he'd stare intently at the ground or his shoe, as an uncannily powerful, convincing voice issued from the emaciated frame. Okay, scratch that. The Himalayan Bear is the new Antony — but no need for the Johnsons here, just arresting vocals and an endless patience, never needing to rise from the rocking chair on the porch to get us all to quiet down and pay attention. (By the way: Chet, if you're wondering, does an alarmingly catchy and energetic resuscitation of indie-rock, which takes years off Beattie's voice.)

‘I’ve toured before, but never to the South or eastern States. I’m in awe of a lot of it—driving on the Bayou, the highway next to a swamp. We stop the van, get out for gas, and whoa, we’re in Louisiana! The context of that, to look around and see this sort of place where rock and western music as we know it today basically came from here … ” Ryan Beattie trails off, searching for the essence of his postcard-ish vignette. “There’s a lot of poverty. I knew it existed, but you see these shacks … ” The Victoria-based musician and lapsed filmmaker is an elliptical conversationalist, excitedly shuffling through stacks of ideas, images and intentions in his mind, given to thoughtful silences as he burrows into a notion, and equally sudden bursts of communication as he extends earlier avenues of discussion. As befits the art he turned away from, he has a documentarian’s eye, storyteller’s heart, boundless curiosity and appetite for stimulation. He’s like one big, intense and slightly goofy sensory organ, unleashed on the planet to soak up as much ambient experience as possible and to distill his responses into oddball serenades that house his singular moonlit croon. Over the course of three epic albums with Chet, the four-piece band he formed with his brother, Beattie’s shown himself to be defiantly restless—each record is an aural missive that takes his fascinations down progressively more interesting byways. Plenty of people throw musical references around, but Beattie harnesses them into wholly novel expression that evokes the soul of his sources—everything from Buddy Holly-ish proto-rock to Mediterranean peasant-folk. Under his solo-ish moniker, Himalayan Bear, he remains lucid, album-oriented and exploratory. “Himalayan Bear; Chet—I’d like to have them fused but giving them names created this distinction,” Beattie sighs. “It was just easier to have stuff directly involving the band separate from what I was doing alone. It’s one body of work, I think.” His Himalayan Bear debut, last year’s Lo Lonesome Island, picked up where Chet’s sophomore release, Kau’ai, left off, fusing roots-pop with straight-faced Hawaiian balladry. His complete lack of irony and refusal to belittle his obvious enjoyment of his references heightens the romantic (in the poetic sense; rather than dime-store cheapness) bareness of his idiosyncratically textured creations. “I ripped off Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘The Bottle Imp’ on Lo Lonesome,” Beattie chuckles. “I had an infatuation, a nostalgic obsession, with Hawaii, and the beautiful melodies fit in with what I often play.” His new offering, … attacks the brilliant air, is aesthetically sympathetic and linked to his other work, but the animating idea is entirely different. “Lo Lonesome came out before this one, but I intended this first,” he says. “It’s not Hawaiian at all—more folky, pretty quirky, quite pulled back.” Indeed, the only outsized thing about … attacks is the length of most songs. The record is relentlessly intimate, a series of mise-en-scènes and somnambulant staggers, like an all-night conversation. “We recorded at an old bookstore in the middle of night,” Beattie recounts. “I was trying to tell a whole story, but not have a narrative. This one is really about pulling back from that, trying to be minimal again, and using the environment we were recording in. Nothing conscious. The album direction took off with what I had—the instruments and the incredible tone of the room. I wanted the record totally subdued, but concentrated tone-wise and meditation-wise.” He adds, “It was nice to try to do that. Studios are usually sterile places. You create sound from scratch.” Yet his mercurial intellect is already elsewhere, perhaps still in the Bayou, communing with the roots of soul and blues and rock. Those influences may percolate in his mind and bewitch his fingers as they caress his guitar. With Beattie, you just never know where his long song is headed next.

Himalayan Bear Sings of Laughter, Pain, and Crushing Dread Victorian and Chet guitarist Ryan Beattie's stunning solo effort By Jeff Friesen “We got quite drunk on Vodka with members of the Latvia National Opera that night and almost missed our flight out of [Russia] the next day. That is, if it weren't for an angry German booking agent yelling ‘come on Ryan, we don't have time for this dilly dallying. Get on the bus!’ A hangover caused me to laugh uncontrollably while my head was splitting with pain and crushing dread.” Ryan Beattie, a Victoria-based songwriter who performs under the moniker Himalayan Bear, has a gift for story telling. While saying little to nothing explicitly about his music, Beattie’s reflections on experiences such as this are at the very essence of what makes him such a great artist, as conveyed on his recent disc Himalayan Bear… Attacks the Brilliant Air. This is a songwriter with a stunning capacity to elaborate on his surroundings, seeing situations that may be glanced over by others as rare moments of beauty. This is a songwriter that is able to see moments, in all their fragility, to be full of enticing contradictions, and illustrates this in his music in sometimes unsettling, yet always picturesque ways. In short, listening to Himalayan Bear is exactly like laughing uncontrollably while having a head that is splitting with pain and crushing dread. Himalayan Bear began as a side project for Beattie as he felt as though he wanted something to work on outside of his main project Chet (a four piece band Beattie formed alongside his brother). In 2006 he released his first album as Beattie is a songwriter with a stunning capacity to elaborate on his surroundings Himalayan Bear, Lo Lonesome Island. Unlike the epic nature of the Chet releases, Lo Lonesome Island was much more subdued album, carrying a lazy Northwest beachfront aesthetic with it. It was a stripped down album that served as a wonderful foil to the larger and more extravagant albums being put out by Chet. However, in 2007 with a spring tour alongside fellow Victorians Frog Eyes and the release of his second album …Attacks the Brilliant Air, Himalayan Bear appears to be turning a corner of some sorts. “That tour gave it a sense of seriousness to me. There were people that knew the record and came to see me play. I’ve anticipated recording another album ever since. Still, having a band is way better. Guy with a guitar gets old pretty fast” One of the ways in which this newfound ‘seriousness’ plays out on the new record is through the sound of the record. On …Attacks the Brilliant Air Beattie expands the instrumentation to include saw, clarinet, dalrube, accordion, cello, and drums, giving the album a more grandiose feeling to it than Lo Lonesome Island. With …Attacks the Brilliant Air, Beattie’s “guy with guitar” thing is now infused with an occasional splash of instrumental variety. The overall sound of the album is absolutely stunning, as Beattie is constantly creating a dark and disquieting aesthetic to the album, simply through how the instruments sound on the recording. How the album was recorded, what makes it sound the way it does, is just as important to what eventually ended up being on the record. “The main reason for the way the songs are structured was the location we were recording. My friends Kate and Ben use to run a bookstore in Victoria that had 25 foot ceilings. They let me record there at night and I had a long time to do it. It sounded so beautiful in there, especially the organ. I ended up adding these long droning It sounded so beautiful in there, especially the organ passages simply because I enjoyed listening to the room. The space conducted the performance and ultimately arranged the songs.” The end result of this process is that through …Attacks the Brilliant Air, Himalayan Bear has been able to create a captivating song cycle which feature songs that, both lyrically and musically, conjure up beautiful textures and imagery. Whether it’s through the long drones of “A Light Grows Brighter…” the sporadic free-form nature of “Empty Tigers or the Roaring Sea?” or the decaying ballad “The Lost Love” these songs carry the listener to unforeseen and enjoyable places. What’s most exciting about all of this is that Beattie seems to be far from finished. You get the sense while listening to the album that this is unfinished business. And Beattie seems to agree. “When I get home from tour, I'll be starting a Himalayan bear record with my bud Tolan who has a studio in a cabin in his back yard. He's recorded most of the Frog Eyes, Chet and Carolyn Mark albums. Chet is going to release an album on the San Francisco label Absolutely Kosher. Frog Eyes tours in the spring as well as Chet.” As great as both Lo Lonesome Island, and …Attacks the Brilliant Air are, Himalayan Bear has yet to even hit his stride. With his knack for elliptical storytelling, and his fascination with sound, Beattie is an artist full of potential. We can expect more music from Beattie (both in Chet and Himalayan Bear), which is most exciting to hear.