Bryant Park Picnic Performances: Emerging Music Festival Day 1 – Chanel Beads, Mei Semones, Los Esplifs

Chanel Beads — the project of New York-based musician Shane Lavers — recently released its debut album, Your Day Will Come, which marks Lavers’ arrival as a new force in experimental music. Throughout the album, Lavers captures the many contradictions of modern existence and the strange infiniteness of the digital world. Though he incorporates the scrappy sonics of post-punk, the gripping sentimentality of pop tunes, and the spectral artifice of electronic music, he blurs lines through unconventional song structures that build into transcendental climaxes. As he intentionally prints his songs down to embed fried artifacts and ghostly remains, the resulting songs have a time-collapsing quality, both transitory and timeless.

Mei Semones’ sweetly evocative blend of jazz, bossa nova and math-y indie rock is not only a way for her to find solace in her favorite genres, but is an intuitive means of catharsis. Semones chronicles infatuation, devotion, and vulnerability in her songs, complete with sweeping strings, virtuosic guitar-playing and heartfelt lyrics sung in both English and Japanese, that have all become part of her sonic trademark: ornately catchy, genre-fusing compositions serving as the backdrop to tender lyrics touching on the universalities of human emotion.

Influenced by Fania, fashion, and psychedelia, Los Esplifs blends nostalgic rhythms and sounds with progressive youth culture. Led by Bandleaders Saul Millan and Caleb Michel, this genre-bending, psychedelic “conjunto” is an instant explosive performance. With an EP and two full-length album releases in their arsenal, this six-piece Latin-Psych group is not slowing down.

Bryant Park Picnic Performances presented by Bank of America is a free outdoor festival (May 31 – September 13) that welcomes all New Yorkers to experience the city’s vibrant arts and culture. The series provides a platform for extraordinary artists and serves as a vital outdoor venue for a wide array of New York’s cultural institutions. To find out more, visit https://bryantpark.org/activities/picnic-performances