Tarboo Tapes Label Launch ft. Bete Grise, Not Lenny, Sheepcamp, & Marlo Mudd

The Quilcene Lantern is proud to announce the launch of its in-house record label, Tarboo Tapes! Tarboo Tapes provides a platform for hyper-local music made right here in our backyard: the remote and wild Olympic Peninsula.

featuring: Bete Grise (debut album release show!), Not Lenny, Sheepcamp, & Marlo Mudd

5pm doors//6:30pm music 

$10 advance//$15-25 at the door

all ages, bar w/ id 

For more info about Tarboo Tapes, go here. 

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Bete Grise (“bay-duh gree”) takes their name from a vast bay overlooking Lake Superior on Michigan’s remote Upper Peninsula, just down the road from lead singer/songwriter Solomon Kronberg’s childhood home. Derived from the French bête grise, meaning “gray beast”, the place is shrouded in mystery: local legend describes sightings of a supernatural gray creature that roamed the area; others say the sand on the beach “sings”, the personified cry of an ancient Native American woman who lost her drowned lover in the lake. Whether or not you believe in its haunted reputation, the place evokes a sense of infinitude, offering a natural beauty that is both terrifying and awe-inspiring, not unlike Kronberg’s adopted home: Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. 

Kronberg’s songs reflect his environment: expansive guitar tones rendered in explosive moments of triumph, timeless melodies offered in quiet confession, and wide-ranging lyrics that explore themes of loss, yearning, hope, and a search for belonging in the vastness of the wilderness. If there is a thesis to Bete Grise’s debut full-length, “Easter Mountain”, it can be distilled into the title track. Soft murmurings of guitar give way to transcendent moments of noise, carrying lyrics that describe:

Where the highway is a hallway 

Circle starting 

A ring that never ends

This confounds me, just confounds me 

Says Kronberg, “For me, the album is about liminal states of mind. Wandering, working, loving, all ‘real’ experiences. But the songs document moments where I felt overwhelmed by the unreality of life, or maybe moments that felt like blurs of dreams and waking. Imaginary memories and thoughts. Who knows.”

Like the mist that forms over the Olympic Mountains, or the singing of the sand at Bete Grise, “Easter Mountain” brings the listener comfort in the liminality of beauty, offering fleeting glimpses of dreamlike illusion and blurring the lines between mirage and reality.

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Ellie Baird, the lead singer/songwriter behind Not Lenny, was raised in Illinois, but musically came of age in the lush farmland of the Olympic Peninsula. Her debut EP, Desire, straddles both worlds: tightly crafted arrangements of songs about coming of age in the midwest, executed by the Olympic Peninsula’s finest musicians, mixed by Casey Foubert (Sufjan Stevens, The Shins) in Chicago. At the center of it all is Baird’s voice, sometimes airy and delicate, sometimes broad and expansive, but always with timbral depth and adorned with shimmering vibrato. Her band matches her range of expression: Solomon Kronberg’s electric guitar both whispers secrets and carries the band to raucous heights, while Colin Schmidt’s bass and Adam Amr’s drums undergird a rhythm section that is both dynamic and steadfast. 

Baird sings about the awkwardness of adolescence, the uncertainty of growing older, and the experience of losing one’s sense of self in the throes of a faltering relationship, but ultimately reclaiming it on the other side. In “Headlights” Baird quips, “My usual escapes are losing charm as I age // I’d drink myself to stumbling but honestly I don’t need the headache”. The arc of “Desire” is a redemptive one: Not Lenny reveals the power of self-assuredness in the face of the unknown, and the strength to be found in rebuilding from the entropy of heartbreak.

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Sheepcamp songs sit on the edge of big love. They remind us that animal, human or otherwise, all shape and break our hearts. Born out of place, Sheepcamp invites us to gather around our grief and ghosts. Much like its transient namesake the band is composed of musicians who span the landscapes of ranching, farming, and wildland fire. With relation to cyclical nature they paint scenes that the listener can hold in their hands.

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Check out Marlo Mudd's music here.