The Psalters
Pretty bored at work and things are quiet at the moment. So I thought I’d write something.. what? Well I might of even mentioned something on these guys before and their associations but I’ll write it again now..
Towards the end of my first year at Uni I heard about a band of musicians who were quite unlike anything else I’d ever heard before. They have a lot of indian, gypsy, klezmer and middle eastern influences going on despite being American and white; they then take those influences and blend them with punk elements and a fair use of sampling. It’s strange that any of these things work together, it’s even stranger then that the original Psalter, Scott Kreuger calls the band a religious vocation with the aim of writing 21st century psalms. They live a nomadic life on a big black American schoolbus which has been converted to run on vegetable oil and they travel around the world playing music and spouting theology. They don’t always play gig venues but just set up shop in parks, houses, churches and streets. I’ve heard over the last 8 years over 100 people have been Psalters at one point or another. They’re Christian, I’m fairly sure they’re anarchists too.
You can download a fair bit of the music the Psalters put out via free download off their website, but they’ve also released two albums.. which apparently you can get by post.. if you live in the US. A year after hearing about them though I had a Norwegian friend tell me she’d seen them in Norway and let me borrow the albums she bought. Apparently during the gig they told the audience “Feel free to take a CD, give whatever money you want.. or take whatever money you want.” Which I thought was kind of cool. I heard they’re playing a festival in Norway next year so I might try and get out there with my friend sometime. I wonder what it’d be like to be a psalter?
