Blue Moose and the Unbuttoned Zippers returns to notloB

Blue Moose and the Unbuttoned Zippers are the recipient of the 2008 Falcon Ridge Folk Festival "most wanted to return" artist award and performed as a notloB Folk Concerts artist on May 23, 2009.

BMUZ, featured in the January/February 2010 edition of Dirty Linen magazine, will be returning for a notloB engagement at the Unity Church of God on Saturday, January 23, 2010!

Details soon at http://notlobmusic.googlepages.com

This is an excerpt from the print edition of Dirty Linen #145 (January/February 2010).
The full article is in the magazine, available on newsstands, by subscription, and at the Dirty Linen webstore.

Blue Moose and the Unbuttoned Zippers

Say What?

by Chris Kocher

Any discussion of Blue Moose and the Unbuttoned Zippers -- a neo-traditional string band of four young musicians from the Boston area -- naturally has to start with the name. Ask about it, though, and the answer isn't the whimsical one you might expect. Not entirely, anyway. In a quiet moment after the group's main stage performance at July's Falcon Ridge Folk Festival in upstate New York, chatty band members were in the mood to mix a little philosophy with a discussion of their music. "It's tapping into the duality-of-man kind of stuff," said guitarist Stash Wyslouch of the band's unusual moniker. "We play a lot of sad tunes, but we also play a lot of happy tunes. We play some slow tunes and we play a lot of fast tunes. So I guess the 'blue' part comes from the sadness, the 'moose' comes from a general appreciation of titanic creatures, and the 'unbuttoned zippers' part is definitely the duality-of-mankind vibe -- you can't unbutton a zipper, and you can't unzipper a button. So it all just plays on all these little traits within each of our characters and melding them all together to an obscenely long name." Okay, then. Glad we got that sorted out. There's no doubt that each of the Blue Moose crew comes from a strikingly different background. Wyslouch, influenced by hip-hop and funk, lives for rhythm and groove. Bronwyn Bird plays accordion and nyckelharpa, the traditional stringed instrument of Sweden, where she lived and studied for a year. Fiddler Andy Reiner, who's played for years with his father and others in the Reiner Family Band, is steeped in Cape Breton jigs and reels as well as a half-dozen other styles. And Hardanger fiddler Mariel Vandersteel has studied traditional music in Ireland and Norway, including a three-month stint at a Norwegian music college this fall.

This is an excerpt from the print edition of Dirty Linen #145 (January/February 2010).
The full article is in the magazine, available on newsstands, by subscription, and at the Dirty Linen webstore.

Purchase Blue Moose and the Unbuttoned Zippers CDs at Amazon.com