Tuesday, September 9, 2025 at 8:00 PM
Lodge Room, Los Angeles
Originally from Illinois, **Meg Remy** is established as one of the most acclaimed songwriters and performers to emerge from Toronto’s eclectic underground music scene where she currently lives. As the creative force behind the musical entity **U.S. Girls**, her celebrated discography spans 15 years from early experimental works released on the Siltbreeze label and includes three Polaris Prize shortlisted albums on 4AD: ***Half Free*** (2015), ***In A Poem Unlimited ***(2018), and ***Heavy Light ***(2020). All three albums also garnered Juno nominations for Best Alternative Album. Remy has toured extensively through Europe and North America, establishing a reputation for politically astute commentary and theatrical performances with her extended U.S. Girls band, leading her to be named the best live act of 2018 by *Paste Magazine*. During this time, she has maintained a visual arts practice, exhibited collage work and directed several music videos and other video art works including her short film *Woman’s Advocate* (2014), in which she also performed. Recently, Remy published her first book, a memoir called ***Begin By Telling*** (2021), and she also made her first foray into film-scoring this year, having been tapped for filmmaker (and fellow Torontonian) Grace Glowicki’s surreal horror-comedy ***Dead Lover ***(which world-premiered at Sundance Film Festival and featured at SXSW). As a platform and persona, U.S. Girls operates on a uniquely out-of-time wavelength, alternately wronged and rueful, classic but contemporary, bruised vignettes of poetic Americana through a feminist lens. Her most recent album, ***Bless This Mess*** (2023), marked both a divergence from and deepening of Remy’s songbook, more at peace with her restless truths and moods. New music is set to follow in 2025. Lightman & Lightman Romy and Sari Lightman are twin siblings from Toronto who work in close concert with percussionist and programmer Evan Cartwright (US Girls, The Weather Station). Their previous projects include Tasseomancy and Lightman & Jarvis Ecstatic Band. Lightman & Lightman’s latest musical offering, Sister Smile, draws upon themes of devotion, finding universal strands of beauty in the study of spiritual work. There is a timeless quality to their astral folk songs, weaving shimmering electronics into acoustic arrangements, while the twin sisters’ close harmonies recall The Roches or Kate and Anna McGariggle. Interspersed throughout the record is an imagined conversation between a pair of 20th Century female mystics: Etty Hillesum and Jeanine Deckers. “We wanted to resurrect these two women as a means to examine a creative life founded in devotion,” explain siblings Romy and Sari Lightman, “while exploring our own relationship towards ideas of faith, sensuality, and defiance.” Etty Hillesum was a Dutch Jew far ahead of her time, writing in great detail about queerness and sexuality, experimental psychology and her own spiritual awakening in the late 1930s. Imprisoned in a work camp, she wrote about the mechanisms of evil and the importance of finding humanity while existing within governing systems of incalculable violence. Jeanine Deckers was a Belgian nun who became an international pop sensation with her hit "Dominique" in 1963, hitting number one on the American charts. Despite her international success, the terms of the recording contract left her reduced to poverty with her profits being absorbed by the Catholic church. After discovering her long term romantic relationship with another nun, she was exiled from the Catholic order. Depressed and facing financial ruin, Jeanine and her lover decided to take their own lives. Though they never met in real life, Hillesum and Deckers exist together within these songs. The two women overlap in posthumous interviews, conversations, and surrealistic scenes — where an alternate reality ensued: Hillesum sees Deckers radiant in a magazine. The Lightman sisters began writing these songs by gazing backwards into history, yet are deeply rooted in our present moment.