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I first met Jenny Ritter in the waning days of her first Hungry Young Folk Music Superband, The Gruff – and if they were winding up, you sure couldn’t tell it from the audience! But All Good Things… and so after being toasted at festivals from coast to coast she found herself in the unenviable position of being a starving artist in our expensive little town by the sea. Singer-songwriters (however virtuous) don’t pull the same fees as bands do, so she aired out another aspect of her creative polymath portfolio, and supplemented her coffeeshop tips by puting her graphic design chops on the market, for people who needed handmade art for their wedding invitations or tattoo designs. (In truth the pencils had never been put away, as she’d always been working on gig posters and album covers the whole time – but this side of her creative practice took on perhaps a greater prominence.)

I’ve always been a big booster of the idea of the creative milieu – being part of a community of similar-minded creators who do related work. I found mine on bulletin board systems and IRC chat; she found hers among family and friends at square dances, coffeeshop open mics, jamming in green rooms and in ferry line-ups. Perhaps in some things, the old-fashioned ways are best: her coterie of Canadian alt-folk nobility include David Newberry, Fish & Bird, and Corbin Murdoch & the Nautical Miles (and, er, I sat in with her on a single occasion 8) – while the vast majority of my computer art colleagues I’ve never yet met face-to-face after over 20 years! (TABNet was a very face-to-face crew; Mistigris, even among the locals, not so much so.)

Jenny has wound up in the uncomfortable niche of marginal success like nobility without title or land; while undeniably hugely talented, after decades of steady building her creative endeavours aren’t yet sufficient for her to be a household name or lucrative enough for her to entertain the bourgeois fantasy of owning a house and raising a family (but forgive me projecting my aspirations on her: she cries all the way to Sweden. This profile isn’t a tragedy: she is consolidating and building her musical empire, but despite her formidable forces, it sure is taking a while. Nonetheless, she never stops chipping away at it!) This week her band opened for Lucinda Williams at a show in Scotland to rave reviews (the event that reminded me that it was time to profile her here: she still has a few remaining UK gigs, foreign readers!), but when she comes home it’s going to be another stint of getting the bills paid and scheming the next big tour. (Fortunately, she’s struck upon an ingenius formula for paying said bills: directing a choir of feckless youth singing their hearts out with arrangements of modern indie pop hits. Here you can catch an early clip of her Kingsgate Chorus playing at the defunct venue The Prophouse at a show with my jug band of the damned, about which you’ll be hearing more soon.)
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJNAiZkp9rs&w=560&h=315]

When pressed to submit some works for MIST1015 Jenny was very gracious and sent me more pieces than I actually used; they were all lovely but despite my “in 2015 ALL art is computer art” sloganeering it was becoming increasingly clear that her very traditional art style was markedly dissonant from the growing mounds of computer art I was accumulating; I picked a couple of favorites but any more would have been jarring. Here however they only have to harmonize with the context of her other works, so I intended to air the pieces I left out – but then looked up other art by her, liked it more, and ran those instead. (Ain’t I a stinker!)

Without curating a theme specially intended to accommodate this lovely stuff, I don’t know if you’ll be seeing more of her work in regular Mistigris artpacks, as though I love it dearly, its lovingly stylized details of the natural world stick out as a bit of a mismatch for this virtual world of chunky pixels and chromed Platonic solids, and had I not actively solicited it, the seeds of her art would never have found purchase in the soil of computer art. Until I figure out how to make the two different voices sing together in harmony, a tricky and improbable melding of old and new like Moby’s “Play”, do go forth, and enjoy her art independent of a context of us! I wholeheartedly endorse her music – her second-most-recent album, Bright Mainland, has provided a constant driving soundtrack of rootsy Americana since its release that, like Amelia Curran’s War Brides, has been found to never get stale.

https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=2703376824/size=large/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=0687f5/tracklist=false/artwork=small/transparent=true/