Baim, Matteah

Baim, Matteah

Laughing Boy

Dicristina Stair Builders

Laughing Boy, the second solo album from Matteah Baim, was recorded in Chicago, where it was produced, arranged, and mixed by Baim with engineer Jamie Carter. The album features performances by Butchy Fuego, Robert A. A. Lowe, Leyna Marika Papach, Rob Doran, Emmett Kelly, Hisham Akira Bharoocha, Birdie Lawson, and Rose Lazar. Expanding on the sounds hinted at with her previous band, Metallic Falcons, and her first solo record, Death of The Sun (DiCristina, 2007), Baim has created her most lush and beautiful recordings yet with Laughing Boy.   Matteah Baim was born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In 1996, at the age of 17, she moved to California to study painting and drawing at the San Francisco Art Institute. After graduating, Baim moved to New York where she met Sierra Casady. In 2005, the duo began to write music together and formed the "soft metal" Metallic Falcons. Voodoo Eros released their first record, Desert Doughnuts, in 2006, recorded in Brooklyn, New Mexico, and Chicago, with performances by Antony, Devendra Banhart, Jana Hunter, and Greg Rogove.  After the Metallic Falcons disbanded, Baim moved to Los Angeles and began writing and recording material (both at her Venice Beach home and at Chicago's CarterCo studio) for Death of the Sun. She spent the next two years touring and writing material for Laughing Boy, working on music for several films, and exhibiting drawings. Baim currently lives and works in New York.

Baim, Matteah

Death Of The Sun

Dicristina Stair Builders

Death of the Sun is the solo debut album from former Metallic Falcons singer/songwriter Matteah Baim. Produced by Baim herself, the album features musical contributions from Jana Hunter, Devendra Banhart, Butchy Fuego, Robert Lowe, Rob Doran, Jon Beasley, and Birdie Lawson. Baim recorded Death of the Sun June through August 2006 in part at home in Los Angeles as well as at Chicago’s CarterCo studio where James Carter engineered, all in analog. The album presents a world spaciously phrased and roughly edged, to bring you a type of New Age Grunge. Although its central theme is loss, a deeper sense of triumph lingers. The songs chronicle and depict the moon’s cycle of life and death, giving birth to romantic times. Baim purchased her first guitar from a basement pawn shop in Milwaukee and bought her first album, a Doors bootleg called Whysky Mystics and Men around the same time. She then attempted an occult study of music, piecing together the odd bits she came across, learning music notation from simple classical scores, playing along with the records she found and whoever could give a passing lesson or had time to play. Trading her beloved pawnshop guitar for an electric, she formed the band Metallic Falcons with Sierra Casday of CocoRosie. The Falcons created heavy, rich, ambigious songscapes for Desert Doughnuts, their only album. As the Falcons “fly into the night,” Baim’s Death of the Sun emerges.