Paper Beat Scissors (the brainchild of Tim Crabtree) brings a very special show with a six piece chamber music ensemble to The Carleton to kick off the Halifax Urban Folk Festival on Sunday, August 26th. Joining him on the bill are Toronto’s young buzz band (and July Talk’s Leah Fay’s new fave) Moscow Apartment and our own modern-day beat poet, Tanya Davis. Show time is 8 PM and tickets are $20, available HERE.

Tim Crabtree’s haunting voice burns at the centre of the Paper Beat Scissors sound with an honesty and rawness that skirts discomfort. The relocated-Brit began the project following a move to Canada’s East Coast and soon caught the attention of his adoptive home, recording the highly-acclaimed self-titled debut with Michael Feuerstack (Snailhouse, Bell Orchestre, the Luyas) producing and Arcade Fire drummer Jeremy Gara mixing.  The album, released on Forward Music in Canada and Ferryhouse in Germany, Austria, Switzerland found its way onto BBC and CBC airwaves and the cover CD of Rolling Stone Magazine in Germany.

PBS has toured Canada and Europe, sharing the stage with the likes of Mark Kozelek (Sun Kil Moon/Red House Painters), Owen Pallett, Tanya Tagaq, Great Lake Swimmers and Dan Mangan.  An onstage collaboration with Clogs (regular collaborators and members of the National and My Brightest Diamond) was released as a limited-edition 7″ for International Record Store Day 2013.  The new album “Go On”, set into motion with engineer Dean Nelson (Beck, Thurston Moore, Bat for Lashes), was released in 2015 to great acclaim.

Winners of the Best Young Songwriters award at the 2017 Toronto Independent Music Awards, the Under 18 award in the 2018 Canadian Songwriting Competition, and the Best Young Performer award at the 2017 Canadian Folk Music Awards, Moscow Apartment is driven by a mixture of sweet harmonies and belted refrains, acoustic shimmer and electric crunch, and the clever wordplay of multi-instrumentalists and versatile vocalists Brighid Fry and Pascale Padilla.

Since bursting onto the Halifax music and arts scene in 2006, Tanya Davis has garnered praise from industry, audience, and peers alike, all the while building an impressive and eclectic resume of artistic work and accomplishments. With 4 albums, two books, numerous collaborations, and countless performances, she has stepped across genre and back again, forging new ground in the realm of creative possibility. Her videopoem, How to be Alone – a collaboration with filmmaker Andrea Dorfman – has had more than 8 million hits on youtube, attracting international media and blogger attention, a publishing deal with Harper Collins, and new fans the world over. She tours regularly as a performance poet, musician and public speaker, was the 2011/12 Halifax Poet Laureate and the 2016 Artist in Residence at Dalhousie University’s Faculty of Medicine.