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"Prepare to be mesmerized by the "Naked Lunch" of the Freak Folk movement.”
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“Iris Freeheart exists on the gravelly driveway that links the road of the popular to the mysterious fortification nestled up in the woods. Their performance inevitably feels as much like ritual as it does recital. These songs feel like they are as old as the Carter Family or as new as tomorrow. Prepare to be mesmerized by the "Naked Lunch" of the Freak Folk movement.”
-Aaron Levinson - Grammy Award winning producer, Review for Bell Tower Records New Artists Roster column, 2023
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“Iris Freeheart is a visionary celebration of the many paradoxes of the human mind, music for revolutionary movements and intimate moments. Longing music, music for people who love, have loved, are currently loving and want so badly to love they can't wait another hour. An immense energy occupies the ever-so-narrow space between Iris and the audience, between these voices and your ears. Could it point toward some kind of transcendence?” -Luke Shefski - Hickory Lane Records new album reviews, 2022
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“An Iris Freeheart show is an unabashed embrace. There seems to be a complete disregard for the Mind/body split. Where one might wax lyrical about love, these songs fuck. A stubborn brilliant grounding in the actual bits and pieces that make up a human life. The emotional becomes physical and chrysanthemums around you. Petal by petal, understand that your feelings are grounded in your body and life's meaning rolls on. In that same vein Iris Freeheart embraces the convivial fug of the sing-along. Your heart may skip a tick as you wonder "What, like...kumbaya?" But in fact, you find yourself at the feet of a much older tradition. A ceremony, lest we forget. Voices lifted in unison singing out our hopes and fears, all that is sacred to us is a very old thing, made new again. You find a sort of unity to the person sitting next to you. You see the parts they sing loudly and store them up in your heart. The pump organ makes it holy. The tuba makes it fun. If you like your elder gods goofy, if you love that kernel of light you see in everyman, if you're romantic but deep in the dirt with it, this is the sound for you.”
-Timothy Andrew Rodkey, for Revolution Press, Events Review Sec, 2020
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"Iris Freeheart is myth made music- pulsating subaltern sexualities erupting as exhalations in the fire of communal ecstasy." Aron Pond, Broad Street Review, The Philadelphia Inquirer, 2023
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Iris Freeheart is Yona Davidson (songwriter, lead vocals, organ, guitar) Ello Shertzer (tuba, violin, and harmony vocals), and Erich Pachner (Pedal Steel). Yona is also an instrument builder and performance artist based in Philadelphia and North Western Alaska. His 2014 debut album "Secret Babies" was received with critical acclaim, followed by "Entanglement" (2016) - named one of the top 25 albums of the year by NBT Radio), "Pooky's Prayer" in 2019, and "Millenarian Revival" in 2021. A serial collaborator, Yona has worked with Grammy-Award winning artists and producers Eric Bazilian, Phil Nicolo and Aaron Levinson among others. All of Yona's recorded music to date is under contract with Pop-Up Music in London, UK.
Yona has performed all over the world, in venues ranging from intimate, eclectic gallery spaces in the US and abroad to large concert halls such as The Trocodero & Annenberg Hall in Philadelphia. In addition to being a musician, he is a creator in multiple other disciplines - performance art, kinetic sculpture and novel instruments. His work building novel instruments and musical sculptures came out of a decade of labor on the world’s largest working musical instrument–The Wanamaker Organ–in Philadelphia. Yona’s art work has involved building large-scale interactive music theater installations, making miniature art song books and creating participatory performance events wherein audiences enter his installations and sing songs from his tiny songbooks.
Yona is currently completing a three album series of new music called Hymnal: A Psychosexual Sing-Along for release later this year. The Hymnals recordings anthologize the 63 songs in his performance art piece scheduled to start touring in late summer 2024–Iris Freeheart’s Psychosexual Sing-Along: A Mystical Motown Tour. This piece is centered around handmade art song books which he encapsulated in translucent amber resin blocks and left in various public places along rivers across Central and Eastern Europe, the U.S. and Canada during the Covid pandemic. The 2024 tour consists of pop-up participatory performance events of the music contained in the Hymnal at the sites of the amber blocks.
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Other Biographies for Press (CLICK IMAGE BELOW) |
Summer 2024, in festivals across the US, Canada and Europe this strange, new and provocative work will tour as: Iris Freeheart's Psychosexual Sing-Along: The Mystical Motown Tour
These performances fall somewhere between concert, performance art, group hypnosis, ecstatic service of a leaderless play cult, and psychosexual sing-along. Replete with scratch-&-sniff hymnals, handheld phantasmascopes, projected stop-motion animations, these performances speak directly to the innocent alien in each of us. For all inquiries related to Booking, Collaboration and Support: Please write to: IrisFreeheart@gmail.com
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Music & Video Links: (click on orbs below):
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Where Stryker Road & Crescent Road meet, Gilboa, NY 12076, or: General Delivery, Nome, AK, 99762, United States of America
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