Windsor Ontario's Yellow Wood, centering around brothers Adam Rideout-Arkell (vocals, chords, lots of stuff) and Matthew Rideout (drums, percussion, lots of stuff), is a musically adventurous indie-rockish band, with all kinds of ambition.
Upon releasing our first totally-brothers-produced EP (EP1) in 2004, we recruited friends to form a live band. Once we found our show-legs on the tiny stage of the Phog Lounge, we began making jaunts around SW Ontario, released a second EP in May 2006 as a full band (EP2), and completed two eastern Canadian tours. We had fun and grew as people and musicians. However, as a four piece band with a string of talented members, Yellow Wood had seriously slowed down by 2008, playing shows sporadically and struggling to write songs with the vitality of earlier material. This led us to a crossroads.
In June 2008 we made the difficult decision to cut the band back down to it's core elements for the sake of creating music we believed in and were excited about. We gave up playing live shows and dedicated full-time to writing and recording. The summer was an exploration of weird sounds and new approaches to our songwriting. In the fall we completed and demoed around 20 new songs, which have been cut down over the winter to 13 crackling new tracks that we are very anxious to share with you. They are, in our opinion, the best thing we've ever done. Bold, abrasive, pretty, subtle, bombastic, poignant, base, dancey, epic.
Our friend Iain Kennedy (of Stereo Goes Stellar) joins us on bass and synthesizer for a bold new live show based around a non-linear live looping system built with Max/MSP and Ableton Live, and we're hitting the road in support of our first full-length album, "Son of the Oppressor." Auto-looped syncopated drum roll please. - November 2009
