One night, shortly after Kevin O’Connor moved to Portland, OR in 2002, the now 28-year-old musician was hanging out at a local club when he heard it. A voice uttering a single word: Talkdemonic. It’s a name that O’Connor says fit perfectly with the hip-hop and electronic influenced project he had just started.

Like nothing the Pacific Northwest has seen before, Talkdemonic melds the primal, the classical and the modern to create songs that are as sweeping in scope as they are shattering in intensity. The band calls it folktronic hop and, for the last year, it has helped Talkdemonic create a fanbase in the Pacific Northwest that grows with each performance, the tales of the band’s ability to capture the most human emotions with only drums, viola, a laptop and no vocals attracting curious onlookers that are soon turned into devout fans. Started as a vehicle for the music of Kevin O’Connor soon after the soft-spoken musician moved from the college town of Pullman, Washington to Portland in
2002, Talkdemonic released its first album, mutinysunshine, in the spring of 2004. The album is a wonder of O’Connor’s meticulous mind, featuring a sweeping orchestra of instruments; humming synth lines, plaintive acoustic guitar, dead-steady programmed beats, a mournful concertina and a soaring viola all tethered together by O’Connor’s drumming. But this isn’t drumming that simply settles comfortably in the rock ghetto of the “rhythm
section.” O’Connor uses his kit to both push and pull the songs, creating explosions of emotion and deafening silences with the power to move your ass or move you to tears. Live, Talkdemonic’s music revolved around the mop-topped blonde’s drum kit, his primal beats informed by an obsession with instrumental hip-hop. Then, in the summer of 2004 O’Connor finally convinced Lisa Molinaro, the phantom violist whose instrument played out of O’Connor’s laptop during his live sets, to join him, completing a small band with a huge sound. Talkdemonic’s music was powerful as a solo act, but, as a duo, it turned into something even more: a complicated, multidimensional force churning out hair-raising compositions. O’Connor captured the power and curiosity of his compositions, but it took the addition of Molinaro to bring out the true wonder of the songs, her beautiful viola parts pulling at the listener’s heart while O’Connor worked the head and the feet. As a duo Talkdemonic quickly claimed a big chunk of real estate in the Portland scene, opening shows for Explosions in the Sky, Hood, M83, among others. Soon O’Connor and Molinaro’s shows became sure bets for great Portland music and Talkdemonic was named Willamette Week’s Best New Band of 2005. The award landed the band on the cover of the alternative weekly and in the headlining spot of a showcase that saw a block-long line waiting outside Berbati's Pan in vain to see the band that was simply blowing away a packed crowd inside. Throughout all this Talkdemonic found time to record a highly anticipated sophomore slab called Beat Romantic which will be released by Arena Rock Recording Company in August. They also have planned the first national tour that will see both members filling rooms across the country with their curious and beautiful sound. If you’re lucky, there will be room for you in there too.

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www.talkdemonic.com