THIS JUST IN: we are psyched to announce that we have been selected as one of 4 finalists (out of 53 entrants) in the NC Folk Festival’s Not Your Average Folk Contest!
Help us win an opportunity to perform on the main stage of the NC Folk Festival, and studio recording time with Black Rabbit Audio by visiting www.ncfolkfestival.com/vote to cast your vote.
Voting closes on July 28!
“That was badass. You guys changed the molecular structure of the room last night.” - Jonathan Byrd
Grand Shores is a celebration of musical subtlety, a generous hybrid of old and new styles captured in understated tones, often verging on the ambient and instrumental.
Gabriel Pelli (Onyx Club Boys, The Old Ceremony) and Will Ridenour (Diali Cissokho & Kaira Ba, Zegota) move nimbly across musical traditions. Blending Americana with West African folk, and with instrumentation ranging from fiddle to kora, Grand Shores fuses their original sound with a contemporary aesthetic that draws widely from folk and indie, jazz and punk.
A collaborative project out of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Grand Shores released their first album, "Tradewinds", in 2020 on Robust Records. The album was recorded in a single-room, 100 year-old chapel located in rural North Carolina. Such a setting produces a warmth in the recordings that mirrors the feeling of seeing them live. A Grand Shores performance stokes the fires of familiarity, inviting listeners to a private experience.
At its heart, Grand Shores is a guitar and kora duo, a partnership of American and West African string instruments. Like the easterlies evoked by their album’s title, which forever blow from east to west, Grand Shores brings the world a little closer, one note at a time.