Six Shooter Records Welcomes Pagan-Punk-Poet NYSSA to the Label and Management Rosters
I Wanna Be Your Three-Headed DogSix Shooter Records Welcomes Pagan-Punk-Poet NYSSA to the Label and Management RostersNYSSA Launches “Gemini Season” Residency at The Dakota Tavern, May 24-June 21, 2023
Photo by Calm Elliott-Armstrong
Mark the moment with a howl: Six Shooter officially welcomes NYSSA to both the label and management rosters with the launch of “Gemini Season,” a weekly artist residency at The Dakota Tavern. NYSSA’s residency begins Wednesday, May 24 and runs weekly until June 21. Fans of NYSSA’s writhing rock bangers and spell-casting vocals can expect new music throughout the Wheel of the Year.
“I’ve wanted to work with NYSSA ever since I heard her excellent debut EP, Champion of Love and booked her for Interstellar Rodeo. Her performance then made it clear that she is an artist of the highest calibre, an icon in the making,” says Shauna de Cartier, Founder/President of Six Shooter Records. “I’m thrilled she’s now joined both our label and management rosters. Her profound artistry and intensity is beyond compare.”
“NYSSA is an extraordinary artist,” agrees co-manager Chris Wynters. “She’s an exceptional songwriter, a gifted producer, she has a killer live show, and her vocals are world-class. Be prepared to be blown away.”
While based in Toronto in the present day, NYSSA sources her considerable powers from the old gods of myth and magick, a potent convergence of ancient lore and rock and roll. A student of signs and symbols, cards and caverns, NYSSA’s witchy ways shape her artistic process, a quest through sound and song to seek meaning in chaos. Drawing on the idols, from Bacchus to Iggy Pop, NYSSA gathers force and transforms each stage into her altar.
“I want the music I create onstage with this band to be an invocation, a vengeance cry from primordial depths, a non-exploitative connection to the forces of the earth,” says NYSSA. “I want to engender a fermentation of the original rock and roll themes of sexuality, wildness, and teenage rebellion with the old pagan ideals of kinship, reverence for nature, initiation into the mysteries, altered states, communion with the Otherworld, and the balance of dark with light.”
Don’t fear the Nightosphere. See NYSSA’s “Gemini Season” performances at The Dakota Tavern starting Wednesday, May 24. Tickets here.
ABOUT NYSSA
Toronto pagan-punk-poet NYSSA has put her hands into the lion’s mouth, gathering her performing and songwriting powers to conjure the unruly energy of rock n’ roll. Out from under fear’s thumb, NYSSA now sings about wild things, old gods, romance-beyond-borders, and the exorcism of trauma. She has quested, and she has returned.
The goal is fevered connection, a ritual-sense of music as communal release. NYSSA keens and wails and brings her audience along with her to a place of deep feeling, movement, and joy. Her lyrics are poetic and clear, lunar, eerie, angry; NYSSA’s voice is the strong container for all of it. As Dionysus would want it, over-abundance is the way. Guided by the incantation and invocation of the three C’s: Collaboration, Choreo, Covenhood!, NYSSA’s sound and stories run deep into ancient mythos, Celtic lore and back through our modern idols. Re-swaggering, re-wilding hyper-masc night moves and magick hips (think Jagger, Mink Deville, Danzig), NYSSA’s magnetic, elastic ways make satyrs of us all.
Long-listed for the 2021 Polaris prize for her debut solo album Girls Like Me, NYSSA now plays with a killer 6-piece band, a real rock ’n roll coven, featuring Lukas Cheung (Mother Tongues), Nastia Koza (KOZA), Jay Anderson (Badge Époque Ensemble, Biblical), Brandon Lim (Yamantaka//Sonic Titan), and Jess Burgess (Essie Watts).