Ottawa used to be a lumber town. For some reason, it got chosen as Canada's capital. Beneath the federal veneer, its rural origins linger, drenched in woodsmoke, bar-brawls and glinting saw blades. Two hours down river from Montreal, the woods get a little thicker and the air a little cleaner. It's a place where the city lights merge with constellations, and where The Acorn was born.
A disciple of folk with a strong penchant for experimental pop music, Rolf Klausener started writing under The Acorn moniker in the summer of 2002. Initially an excuse to teach himself home-recording, these furtive experiments would eventually become The Acorn's first full-length release, a mellifluous, electro-acoustic tribute to the Ottawa region, The Pink Ghosts.
After several independent releases, the band created its most ambitious and widely-acclaimed record to date, Glory Hope Mountain. Not quite biography nor musical folk tale, Glory Hope Mountain recounts the early life of frontman's Rolf Klausener's Central-American-born mother. The album's song-stories harbour the triumphs, sorrow.
Since the release of Glory Hope Mountain, The Acorn have toured Europe and North America extensively and accrued a cord of critical love for both their live show and their recorded output.
In the summer of 2009, the Acorn retreated from two years on the road to an isolated cottage in Northern Quebec to begin work on their third full-length album, No Ghost. Songs took shape at all hours, crafted from hazy late-night improvisations, early morning melodies pulled from the thinning threads of sleep. Modernity clashed with the bucolic via exploratory percussion, feedback, acoustic textures and the natural surrounding sounds. The band then traded trees for telephone poles to finish recording in a sweltering heatwave at Montreal's Treatment Room Studios (Plants & Animals, Angela Desveaux). There, the breezy ease of rural surrounds was buried under sweat-caked skin and cracked asphalt, birdsong drowned out by thick air and engine hum.
