Join us at Church Brewing Co. for a night of great music and Neil Young tribute songs with The Olympic Symphonium and Kim Beggs, and special guests including Terra Spencer, Freya Milliken, Kim Barlow and more!
Since late 2006, The Olympic Symphonium have been creating contemplative contemporary folk music, making audiences croon to their beautiful harmonies, lush soundscapes, and to ponder their poignant lyrics.
Consisting of four distinct and diverse songwriters, the band has crafted a full, lush sound that is entirely their own. A sound that features emotional musical flourishes, soaring harmonies that float in and out, and dramatic lyrical content. It is the sound of a strange and beautiful tension. Whether it's the complexity of family life, the inevitability of death, the mundanity of life on the road, or struggles with mental illness, each band member writes with their own life experiences in mind and combines those with that of the other members in a Voltron-like fashion to form one strong and varied body of work. Four become one to create a singular vision and sound. It's the sound of a band not afraid to go deep into the darkness, go against the current and swim upstream.
Over the course of their five studio albums, they have seen support from radio stations like BBC, CBC, P6 (Denmark), and Stingray, press outlets such as The Line of Best Fit, Americana UK, Toronto Star, and Exclaim! and collaborated with artists like Catherine MacLellan, Rose Cousins, Amelia Curran, Rich Aucoin, and many more. They have performed at world-renowned events (the Olympic Winter Games and Pop Montreal to name a few), toured throughout UK, Europe and North America, had music placed on MTV and OLN networks, and been nominated for and won East Coast Music and Music New Brunswick awards.
The Olympic Symphonium are also co-founders of annual Shivering Songs winter festival which attracts over 3000 attendees to their hometown of Fredericton, New Brunswick every January. For the 2015 edition, they partnered with the United Way to produce a show called 'Songs of the City' where the band supported local songwriters who were commissioned to write about members of their community who have been impacted by the programs of UW. These highly-successful, intimate, and rewarding performances continued for a decade and were also brought to audiences in other parts of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.
Over the past 4 years, they have been collaborating with New Brunswick Indigenous producer/MC Wolf Castle as his live band, fusing elements of hip-hop, jazz, and folk music into something truly original.
About Kim Beggs:
Celebrated and 13-time award nominated Yukon songwriter Kim Beggs performs deep, compelling, melodic and lyrical songs through a long ago, ethereal voice that observes the world with acute vision, clearly placing her convictions on the side of humanity.
Often compared to artists like Gillian Welch, Lucinda Williams and Neil Young, audiences experience meaningful connection w/ Kim Beggs as her engaging performances shed a clear-eyed, tough, honest, yet hopeful light through the darkness surrounding us in uncertain times. Between songs, her stories often bring a giggle. Singing of loneliness, vice, hearts, death, and resilience, Beggs unfolds & guides audiences w/ great care & respect.
Beggs warms the room w/ acoustic guitar & a beautiful, backwoods life-affirming heartbeat from her stomp board.
$25 /$15 advance ~ $30 / $20 at the door