&More Tiny Desk Contest entry | still from video
&More, Madalean Gauze and Emily Drinker will play NPR Music’s Tiny Desk Philly 2018 concert
For the past two years, the epilogue to NPR Music’s annual Tiny Desk Contest has been the Tiny Desk On The Road tour, highlighting the artists who made some of the competition’s most impressive submissions in a variety of cities around the U.S. This year, the tour touches down in Philadelphia on Wednesday, June 6th, bringing &More, Madalean Gauze, and Emily Drinker to the upstairs stage at World Cafe Live.
The hip-hop/R&B ensemble &More is the project of singer Donn T and rapper Chill Moody, backed by an impressive nine-piece band; they’ll be at the XPoNential Music Festival this summer, and their song “WOAH” was performed with contagious energy in a tight office space.
Indie rocker Madalean Gauze has been impressing us here at The Key since her radiant 2014 EP American War, and most recently, the cutting FUNeral EP; for her Tiny Desk entry, Gauze and her five-piece band performed “The Fire” in a surreal and sinister house in the midst of a short film.
Singer-songwriter Emily Drinker caught our ear back in December with the eclectic Run The Race EP, her first release in six years. In it, she uses guitar and voice and loops to dabble in country, Soweto and a cappella; her Tiny Desk Entry rendered the new song “Sunshine” in vocal loops.
Tickets for the Tiny Desk Contest go on sale on Wednesday, May 9th at noon; you can get your tickets now, via NPR Music. Check out our full roundup of Philadelphia entries to this year’s Tiny Desk Contest here.