Origivation Magazine When you listen to Paper Masques, you don’t just hear the music, you feel it. It conveys something lovely that chills you at the same time… The only way to describe what’s heard is a hauntingly beautiful trip… Their sounds are an echo of this amazingly chaotic city that will linger on with you once you allow them to fill your thoughts and emotions.
Philadelphia Weekly Steve Quaranta has come a long way from the 15-minute-a-week group piano lessons he had while attending grade school. Since forming Paper Masques close to six months ago, the onetime member of Zelda Pinwheel (the band is on unofficial hiatus) has already released an EP and is set to release its first long-player Saturday night at the Fire. Tell the Ghosts It’s Suppertime bursts with impassioned drum beats, frentic electric guitar riffs and gently strummed acoustic chords. You’ll even hear a kazoo on a few tracks.
“I wanted to write more structured, song-oriented material, as opposed to the weird, semi-improvised stuff we were doing with Zelda Pinwheel. I wanted to see what would happen if I reined myself in and did things that were more vocal-oriented,” Quaranta explains.
As he began to focus more on songwriting and vocals, Quaranta was also able to approach lyrics in an unusual way. “People that have been in my life, either real or imaginary, interact throughout [the album],” he says. “[The songs] are kind of snapshots. I’m not trying to tell whole stories—I’m giving pieces of dialogue or little images and leaving big holes that I want to let other people fill in themselves.”
Quaranta began Paper Masques as a solo acoustic project, but at the urging of Jonas Oesterle—host of the Fire’s open mic night and eventual Paper Masques drummer—Quaranta expanded his work to feature a full band. Normally a four-piece, the album features 13 musicians, and Quaranta aims to bring most of them out for the album release show.
“It’s going to kind of be a complicated stage plot, but I think we’ve got it worked out pretty well.”
City Paper Stephen Quaranta was walking through the souk in
Marrakesh, some jangly pop music in his headphones competing with the
guy on the street blowing a kaval. This did not actually happen, but
the songs he writes in Paper Masques sure suggest it. Aided by former
Teeth drummer Jonas Oesterle and a guest roster of local heads, the
release show for Tell the Ghosts It's Suppertime should feel like a street market party, squeezed into The Fire.