Axel & Lolo are a best friend and folk-pop duo. They craft melodies that are as heartwarming as they are infectious. Through imaginative storytelling, Axel & Lolo write about themes of friendship and feelings. Their unique sonic world transports listeners to a place where every note is a vibrant expression of their profound connection. Axel & Lolo’s music invites you to dance, dream, and celebrate the beauty of humanity — making them a beloved fixture in the indie music scene.
Artist Category: Indie Folk
Nemarca
Nemarca is the musical project of artist Anna Reidister.
Anna Reidister is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and musician located in Boston, MA. Her work explores the intersection of storytelling, character building, and late-stage capitalism through performance, event production, post-digital objects, folk art, and poetry. She aims to expose the absurdity of neoliberalism, imagine new worlds and envision alternate realities. She has performed at Massachusetts College of Art’s Alumni & Founders Day, Club Passim’s campfire. festival, Boston Neighborhood Network’s Community Media Day, and the Winthrop Pride Festival hosted by Senator Lydia Edwards. She holds a BFA from Massachusett College of Art and Design in Interrelated Media and a minor in Creative Writing.
Geordie Gordon
You’ve likely seen Geordie Gordon on stage. The Toronto singer/songwriter is currently a member of two internationally acclaimed indie acts: U.S. Girls and Islands. He also served as a sideman for Andy Shauf just prior to that songwriter’s 2016 breakthrough. When not on the road, he works in a queer bookstore stocked with coming-of-age stories. His second solo album, Tambourine, is Geordie’s own coming-of-age story, in more ways than one. It’s the album that will introduce the world to Geordie Gordon’s depth of talent as a singer, arranger, lyricist and melodicist.
Geordie Gordon was 16 when gay marriage was made legal in his home province of Ontario. He was raised in an accepting community of hippies and leftist punks. He’s a son of James Gordon, a successful Canadian folk singer covered by the Cowboy Junkies on The Trinity Session. Geordie formed his first band as a teenager, the misnomered Barmitzvah Brothers (featuring Bird City’s Jenny Mitchell). They toured Canada and were on the cover of Toronto’s Now Magazine. They sounded like nothing else on the thriving Canadian indie scene at the time: junkstore instruments, unusual lyrics, and a childlike sense of play—because they were still actual children.
Everything about Tambourine is a huge leap forward for Geordie. The layered vocal harmonies explore both his falsetto heights and the lower end of his register. The electronics of The Tower are still present, as are the soft pop vibes of U.S. Girls and Islands.
From teenage awakenings to the wisdom of elders, Tambourine is the record Geordie Gordon was born to make. And he’s just getting started.
Kass Richards
Kassie Richardson, who performs solo as Kass Richards, grew up in rural Virginia, just east of Patsy Cline’s hometown. A common weary break of the voice, a tug of the lonesome, can be detected in her singing. Richards has been a central member of the U.S. Girls band and most recently was one of many musicians chosen by Meg Remy to help record her acclaimed album Heavy Light (4AD), at Hotel2Tango.
She released her debut record, The Language Shadow in 2020. In February of 2024 Richards released a record with Aidan Coughlan called When We Were Wolves, and has now just released her newest record, New Love Meditation.
Maddie Lam
There are truly gifted people in this world, with a talent not only for art or music, but also for making people feel seen. Maddie Lam is the pinnacle of this gift.
As a child, Lam developed an interest in music, singing and taking piano lessons. After teaching herself guitar, she later began writing songs at age 14 as a way to cope with the world around her. The daughter of immigrant parents, she wants to pursue her music to the fullest extent, appreciative of the sacrifices it took to get her there.
When discussing her songwriting process, Lam states, “Some songs are like friends that you connect with immediately… other songs take months and years.” Her art is worth the time and effort it takes, including the creation of her music video for the song, “Violet Sky.” A process that she describes as laborious, but in an environment full of incredible artists, visionaries, and directors. As difficult as creating visual art, and songs can be, she says, “the role of the artist, for me, is about looking at the pain and not turning away… choosing to alchemize it.” Lam has experimented with visual art, focusing on self portraits. “I try to find the beauty in myself… to find a beauty that’s useful” she explains about her work with painting and photography.
Along with recorded music and accompanying visuals, Lam has stepped into the world of live performance. “It’s one of the most intimate things we can do with other people, to be in ceremony with other people… it’s quite ancient” she states. Live music is like capturing a firefly, Lam believes, and we get to show it to the people we hold close. Recently, she put together a band, taking on performances together. Their recent endeavor, a performance for the WGBH radio station, felt like an out of reach dream only a year ago for Lam. Her hard work and dedication amounts to deep connections and incredible music. Lam wants people to see “what happens when you dream out loud, when you dream with your feet and your hands and your heart.”
Aleksi Campagne
Named Penguin Eggs & Roots Music Canada’s New Discovery of the Year, Aleksi Campagne offers a contemporary, indie-folk take on the time-honoured fiddle-singing tradition. Born and raised in Montreal, Aleksi’s music blends folk songwriting with an edgy, multi-layered sound resulting from his unique combination of voice, violin and looping-effect pedals. His debut album For The Giving / Sans rien donner was just nominated for a Canadian Folk Music Award (April 2024), and is a fully bilingual album offering 10 songs in French and the same 10 songs in English.
Aleksi’s debut has been a whirlwind! Aleksi was selected as a Mariposa Folk Festival Emerging Artist to perform at the festival. His first single Another Day was picked by Paul Corby as a Top Single of 2022. He was then celebrated by Tom Coxworth as one of the Top 5 Favourite acts at the Folk Alliance International Conference, alongside acts like The Fretless and Mary Gautier. His second single Won’t be Scared was selected as the only Canadian finalist in the Kerrville Folk Festival’s Grassy Hill New Folk Competition for Emerging Songwriters. In a review in Le Devoir by Sylvain Cormier, Aleksi’s debut was compared to that of Patrick Watson and Half Moon Run. According to Roots Music Canada, “Aleksi Campagne finessed one of the most musically ambitious accomplishments of the year, an impeccable double album, one set of songs in two conjoined bilingual packages.” He is now touring his album with over 50 shows in Canada and the United States!
Paco Cathcart
The Cradle is the musical project of Paco Cathcart. Born and raised in Brooklyn, and having cut their teeth at seminal DIY venues such as Palisades, The Glove, Silent Barn, etc, Cathcart has been a fixture in the New York underground for a decade or so. Often the lone “singer-songwriter” on bills with noise musicians, performance artists and clowns, Cathcart’s eclectic music reflects their locality in a thriving experimental arts scene, as well as their root interests in folk music, story-telling, history and poetry. Cathcart has something like 50 releases on cassette, vinyl, CD, and digitally, through many different indie labels, notably NNA Tapes, as well as self-releasing.
Miles Hewitt
Miles Hewitt is a songwriter and poet residing in Brooklyn, NY. His debut record, Heartfall, drew critical raves, including from The Boston Globe, who named it one of the 50 Best Albums of 2022 and wrote: “A simply brilliant debut . . . by turns intimate and epic, lush with strings and delicate fingerpicked guitar, languid psychedelia and dreamy pedal-steel painted soundscapes.” Heresiarch proclaimed that “Hewitt is truly in league with the likes of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen” and named Heartfall their favorite album of 2022.
Alexa Rose
Alexa Rose was born in the Alleghany Highlands of western Virginia, raised in the tiny railroad town of Clifton Forge. Though no one in her immediate family played or sang, she inherited a deep musical legacy.
“Growing up I would hear stories of my great-grandfather Alvie who, for a time, lived and played with [bluegrass great] Lester Flatt when they were both young men,” says Rose. “Apparently, Lester tried to get him to move to Nashville and pursue a career. But my great-grandfather decided to stay in the mountains with his wife on their farm.”
That sense of place and storytelling spirit became woven into Rose’s voice and songwriting. In 2019, she released her debut album Medicine For Living, the title track of which won Merlefest’s revered Chris Austin Songwriting Contest. Her 2021 follow up Headwaters garnered national attention from American Songwriter and Rolling Stone, among others. Rose wrote most of the album in the early stages of the pandemic, which she astutely characterizes as having “that weird lucid feeling of not-time.”
“Headwaters are the source of a river. The furthest point from where water merges with something else. They are not mighty. Just a network of small tributaries, like a creek, not necessarily picturesque, but they’re the most important part of the river. Water is fluid and inconsistent and sacred and indifferent. You can be miles down a river, but you’re still at the origin. And in that way, water feels like it has transcended time. That’s how these songs found me—the same way memories do, in that slivering, elusive water. As quickly as you come across them, you bend in another direction.”
Perhaps following in the steps of her great grandfather, Rose’s songs feel like oil paint landscapes of her own life in the mountains, often wringing out the beauty in mundanity and exploring timeless topics. Her earnest, well crafted stylings are a multi-layered merger of old country music and traditional folk songs, colored by rock and roll and mountain soul.
Max García Conover
Max García Conover is a songwriter from the burned over district of New York, now based in Maine. In the past he’s collaborated with Son Canciones, Haley Heynderickx, Ben Cosgrove, Paula Prieto, The Ballroom Thieves, and Julie Arsenault. In between songs he tells stories and those stories have been featured on The Moth Radio Hour and Stories From The Stage.
