Montreal’s Tess Roby is sharing a new video for album title-track “Given Signs”, which was filmed in and around Los Angeles and directed by Tess Roby herself & Hugo Bernier. Tess Roby will tour Europe this autumn with a headline London show on October 1st at the Shacklewell Arms. Given Signs was released earlier this year via Italians Do It Better.

The photographer and musician, an eight-year veteran of the Canadian Children’s Opera Company, seems utterly original, moving with a restless energy toward the sublime. Her sound betrays an intrepid longing to discover and explore, to reject convention and transcend cliché: Roby is a born traveller, absorbing everything she hears and making it new. Ethereal and crystalline, bathed sumptuously in synths, her music is heady, dreamy, singular — a transmission from parts unknown. The classical training and aesthetic omnivorousness combine like worlds colliding.

Roby’s debut album Beacon was written in 2015, following the death of her father. She collaborated with her brother Eliot to create what they describe as a kind of spiritual homage — both to her father and to the Beacon, where the family travelled often. Roby recorded these songs with the drum machines and synthesizers she found in her father’s recording studio, and galvanized by his spirit she imbued the music with love, movement, whispers, memories, and pain. “All the while the Beacon remained effervescent in my mind,” Roby remembers. “Visions of it ablaze on the hilltop, standing motionless while I searched for understanding.”

See Tess Roby live:

20th Sept – Reeperbahn Festival, Hamburg, DE
21st Sept – Reeperbahn Festival, Hamburg, DE
22nd Sept – Acephale, Cologne Germany*
24th Sept – Milla, Munich, Germany*
26th Sept – ACUD, Berlin, Germany
28th Sept – Badehaus, Berlin, Germany*
30th Sept – Melkweg, Amsterdam, Netherlands*
1st Oct – Shackewell Arms, London UK
2nd Oct – The Louisiana, Bristol UK*
3rd Oct – The Soup Kitchen, Manchester, UK*
4th Oct – Oslo, London, UK*
5th Oct – Bodega, Nottingham, UK*
7th Oct – The Hope and Ruin, Brighton, UK*
9th Oct – New Morning, Paris, France*
10th Oct – Le Groom, Lyon, France*
11th Oct – Pont Rouge, Monthey, Switzerland*
* – with Men I Trust