The Dispatch: a Southpaw blog

“Soul music is urgent and pleading. It calls your name and calls you out; it wants to be whatever you need in that moment . . .” In recent moments, Candice Anitra has been bearing witness to alchemy at work. Bark then Bite, her forthcoming album, is the product of progressive chemistry coming together: 15 days at Studio G in Williamsburg, Brooklyn with magical producer|engineer|artist Joel Hamilton, the same month he was wrapping Blakroc; Dub Trio’s return from Matisyahu’s tour to lay the musical foundations of the album; Marika Hughes’s rolling through with her cello one Saturday morning after playing for Whitney Houston’s release; Soulive’s Neal Evans’s recording his organ in a hotel room overseas; and lastly, Scotty Hard’s remixing “Objectify” to close out the album – a confluence of fortuitous forces for her debut LP. Bark then Bite is an album that demands to be heard. Not only do all of the collaborators lend their artistic genius and decades of experience across musical genres, but Candice proves herself a force who will make a definitive mark on a new decade of music, art and politics. Candice’s songwriting, with Joel Hamilton and Dub Trio’s embellishment, pushes the envelope with its infusion of funked up rock n roll and with her sexually-seductive politically-progressive lyrical content. Indeed, Candice Anitra defines herself as a singer-songwriter-alchemist. Her words turn life’s grist into gold. Amidst Candice’s progressive feminist angle is a sound that is simultaneously new and vintage – producer Joel Hamilton references the music as “Tina Turner meets The Beatles” or “Fiona Apple meets India.Arie.” Alternately, it’s as if Sade linked up with The Doors or Amy Winehouse merged with Jill Scott. Born and raised in Philadelphia, Candice’s home as a young girl was infused with Motown, the Philly Sound, and Stax Records. She comes from a lineage of singers, whose powerful voices were limited to church and domestic lives. Excited to attend Philadelphia High School for Creative and Performing Arts School – with Boys II Men, ?uestlove, Black Thought – Candice’s parents told her she could focus on the arts later. Worrying about boys’ distracting her, they sent her to Philadelphia High School for Girls. Despite setbacks to dreams of a career as an artist, Candice could never resist her calling. After knee injuries derailed her path as a young dancer, she still needed to express herself creatively. In high school, she pushed the limits of her comfort zone by delving into visual arts, theater, and writing. At Venture Theater’s internship program, she discovered how moving the spoken word could be. From Philly, she moved to the center of the arts world to attend and graduate from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2000. There she received top tier training as an actor and vocalist. The move to New York City afforded her the opportunity to push the edges of artistic expression alongside gifted peers – as a featured vocalist in Kamal Sinclair’s The Beat featuring Mustafa Shakir, as the lead singer of Brooklyn-based True Story featuring Nemiss, as a songwriter for the play Selling Splitsville, and as a singer and performer in numerous other performance art happenings. In 2008, Candice released her EP Easier, produced by Force Theory and engineered by Joel Hamilton at Studio G, music that propelled her demand by music venues throughout New York City and producers worldwide. Growing up to the classic soul music her parents listened to, the 1980’s R&B scene, and Black Lily shows with The Roots, Jill Scott, and India.Arie, Candice has recently been most inspired as an artist by Bill Withers, Ella Fitzgerald, Sam Cooke, childhood friend-saxophonist extraordinaire Jaleel Shaw, and her father William C. Manson. Candice presently lives in Brooklyn, NY with her partner and two young daughters. Along with releasing Bark then Bite and the recent premier of her “Objectify” music video produced by Simon Doolittle, Candice is also in the process of adapting a play for the screen and developing her first serial comic. Candice looks forward to being a songwriter and producer who can help create community arts and youth development centers. In her work, she channels her great grandmother for inspiration, and she is driven to model for her two young daughters the message that they must never let others interfere with their pursuit of their own passions and inner truth.

candiceanitra.com
myspace.com/candiceanitramusic

QUITZOW

Exuding the “aggression of Peaches, the melodic richness and cross-genre fearlessness of the Magnetic Fields, and the disco-classical fusion of the late Arthur Russell” (All Music Guide), Quitzow continues to blur the genre lines with her clever, catchy songs. Drawing inspiration from electronic innovators like Kraftwerk and Daft Punk, 80′s classics like Prince and Bel Biv Devoe, and even current pop explorers like Of Montreal, this record is Quitzow’s answer to a pop radio-feel good experience. She utilizes her abilities as a violinist and cellist to add emotional elements to the genre and her off kilter subject matter to further shake things up. Statements like “upstate New York singer songwriter Erica Quitzow gives her cello and Moog art whimsy a bubbly groove and defiant summer strut” from Spin Magazine aptly describe the dancey palate created from such unlikely instrumentation.