“There is something intrinsically Pacific Northwest about her soft guitar noises and her folk-jazzy odes to nature that is impossible to completely distinguish from her personhood”
— Boston Hassle
“Exquisite Corpse” is grander than Elektra’s debut full-length, “The Lumberjack,” a dynamic record that extracted maximum catharsis from just a pair of guitars and Elektra’s voice. On “Exquisite Corpse,” the complexity of her compositions, their sinuous melodies and unexpected cadences, deepens. A group of sensitive young musicians — drummer Ivanna Cuesta Gonzales, fiddler Zosha Warpeha, bassist Tyrone Allen, pianist Jacob Hiser and trumpet player Milena Casado — fill out the sound, merging with effortless liquidity.
— Wbur The ARTery
"The track [Miami] paints an intricate, nuanced and dramatic style that shows a real sense of craft."
— Various Small Flames
"Eleanor Elektra is a deeply socially engaged artist whose spirit is as true as her melodies. We are proud to have such an innovative songwriter out of Boston! She is surely going places".
— Boston Compass
Eleanor is an interdisciplinary artist originally from the Pacific NorthWest who fuses musical & visual arts.
Her practice spans songwriting, printmaking and installation work. Her music combines elements of folk, jazz and classical music within the songwriter idiom to create unique cinematic songs. Largely a self taught guitarist, her playing is both technical and idiosyncratic, skillfully supporting songs that are rich in both composition and execution.
WE HAVE A NEW ALBUM IN THE WORKS
Not only that, but a real live band has coalesced around this new recording project which we have named SPRY.
Spry is the outcropping of songwriter Eleanor Elektra's original music, a five-piece band, playing jazz, folk, and roots-influenced songs.
Spry is also, by design, a kind of research group, investigating the porous boundaries that Eleanor's lyrics invoke - the existential & internal, tension & flexibility, sickness & recovery, the shoreline & the forest's edge.
Alternatingly precise and wild, the group's collective compositions recreate landscapes where they can bring their audiences in to more fully examine the fragility of the communities and ecosystems around them.
Squaring Max Ridley's joyful, steady upright bass against Zosha Warpeha's richly textural and toothsome fiddle, Jacob Hiser's rippling and elegant piano against Tim Wolf's belly-felt rhythms and animalistic clatters, the group's tensions and collaborations create a bed of wonders for Eleanor to to build her songs upon.
Eleanor has been touring the United States as a solo artist for nearly a decade, and is a mainstay in the local Boston music scene, performing in premiere venues from the House of Blues to local fixtures like The Lilypad.
In August of 2017 Eleanor released her EP “Comet”, a spare, unaffected performance captured on a simple field recorder in the rural woods of the Columbia River Gorge. Nine months later Eleanor came out with a full length album entitled “The Lumberjack” the result of her collaboration with guitarist Jacob Matheus. in 2020 Eleanor Elektra released “Exquisite Corpse”, a concept album about the climate crisis that features full band arrangements. Both “The Lumberjack” and “Exquisite Corpse” were released in tandem with film installations made in collaboration with Boston film maker Lilly Dickinson.