Sun Kil Moon (USA)

Songwriter-producer Mark Kozelek has been active with various groups (Red House Painters, Sun Kil Moon) for over thirty years and has released more than thirty albums, solo or in collaboration with his bands and other musicians—and that’s not including the many EPs and live albums. However, it's not the sheer quantity of music or the length of his career that counts, it's the fact that at least five or six of his albums are considered to be among the most important of the past three decades. 

Mark Kozelek had already achieved cult status in the first half of the nineties with the albums he made with the Red House Painters. As one of the most prominent exponents of the slow, brooding slowcore style, three of the albums of that era (Down Colorful Hill, Rollercoaster, Bridge) are still in circulation today, but the later, more ’folk-rock’ releases are also memorable. The group disbanded in 2001, by which time the bandleader had already made his solo debut under his own name, Mark Kozelek. In 2003 he launched another group, Sun Kil Moon, steadily evolved into a kind of solo production with various partnerships. However, under this banner too, the songwriter's career has been marked by some impressive album releases.

Their very first album, Ghosts of The Great Highway (2003), became one of the most revered folk-rock albums of the 21st century, but their 2014 LP Benji was also a huge critical and popular success. Kozelek—who has also occasionally taken on acting roles (Almost Famous, Vanilla Sky, Youth)—has always been a very personal song writer lyrically, but his slow-ambling style later adopted a more journal-like song-writing format. His last two albums Welcome to Sparks and Nevada, and Lunch in the Park document the author’s life through the 2020s. Having said that, his musical world is varied and diverse: folktronica fusion releases, a Christmas cover album, his own take on AC/DC songs, a release with drone-metal musician Jesu, a minimalist spoken word LP, chamber jazz—He has certainly packed a lot into the last thirty years! Above all, of course, there are many dryly humorous and cathartic songs, of which there will be a few on the occasion of this, his second concert in Hungary.