Grandchildren

Aleks Martray

Philadelphia

Grandchildren is a 5-piece Philadelphia-based band known for their unique cinematic blend of orchestral and electronic music. Started by frontman and composer Aleks Martray in 2008, the band has evolved into a dynamic ensemble of musicians notorious for their layered arrangements and high-energy performances. Martray attributes their eclectic sound to his nomadic upbringing across Europe, the US and Latin America and a sense of nostalgia for music of the past, or as he puts it, “music written by dead people before I was born that makes me feel alive and like myself”. Traces of everything from Grizzly Bear, to Michael Jackson, to Fela Kuti, to Rachmaninoff can be heard. This sensibility of creating sonic collages spanning time, space and genre are what defined their first 2 albums – Everlasting (2010) and Golden Age (2013). With their 3rd album entitled ZUNI (2015), Grandchildren retain their distinctive ability to strike a poetic balance between the intimate and epic, while venturing into new and divergent territory – pop. But their unique take on the genre doesn’t see pop as a dirty word, but rather a form of simplicity, clarity and even therapy for dealing with themes that challenge the soul. Through out the album, joyful celebratory musical moments are at battle with the darkness of the lyrics, washing over them like a baptism, fighting them like an immune system attacking a virus. The resulting feeling is an alchemy of moods that can best be described as a kind of “dark pop” - a poetic tug of war between beauty and darkness, inspiration and despair, played out in melody, rhythm and lyrics. Martray describes the underlying creative process as something akin to lucid dreaming.