Himalayan Bear
Himalayan Bear is the 15 year running project of Canadian musician Ryan Beattie. The band has changed lineups and sounds on every album, sometimes just Beattie with a solo electric guitar, sometimes a 7 piece fuzz driven tropical tinged rock band. The latest iteration comprises some of Beattie’s oldest friends and musical collaborators, featuring members of Lightning Dust, Bison BC and Chet.
The album was made with Jesse Gander at Raincity Studios and was recorded almost entirely at once as a band “off the floor”.
Of the album, Beattie says, “The songs are all homages to the fictional muses or steadfast old friends who’ve convoyed with and inspired me through a life making music. It’s a box of old photos you find. The band is a group of some of my oldest friends, remustered in middle age to make a straightforward record drawing on some of our shared early musical influences. The memories assembled in the lyrics are subject to decay, they’re more of a fantasized recollection. The people playing on the album, we’ve been friends a long time, they’re actually the factual past to me.”
Himalayan Bear’s new album Factual Past will be released May 24th via Oscar St. Records.
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“Thunder rolls like lava out of a garage deep in the rainforest, glimpsed by fleeting flashes from the sky. The band plays like a choir. It projects. It shrieks like the machines that built the world exuviating the moss and clay of eons as they shudder to life once more. The beats pace back and forth like a starved lion at a fence. There’s the bubble of mud and the snap of electricity and the smell of oil and a distant howl, savage and lonesome. Did you dream it? Press your fists into your eyes to watch the colours turn inside out before taking another pull; it’s going to be a long summer. “
– Ford Pier
