Queens-based The Home of Easy Credit challenges the boundaries of free-improvised music, jazz, folk, and pop music with an iconoclastic approach that defies all those who seek to classify music by genre. Two musicians who met in New York in 2008 and were married one year later, Danish multi-instrumentalist Louise Dam Eckardt Jensen and bassist Tom Blancarte have teamed up musically as The Home of Easy Credit, releasing their self-titled debut album on Northern Spy in 2012. Taking their name from a department store sign in a dilapidated section of downtown Houston, Texas which they photographed while on tour there, the duo seeks to hold up a mirror to contemporary musical tastes to create a dark, beautiful and thrilling sound world that reflects upon the decline of contemporary civilization.
Recently gaining notoriety for her improvised solo performances, Jensen uses a broad range of colors, drawn from a long lineage of Scandinavian artists including Jan Garbarek, Arve Henriksen and Björk but blended with saxophone sounds as diverse as Lee Konitz or Mats Gustafsson. An experienced veteran of the New York DIY music scene, Blancarte, who plays electronic futuristic jazz with the Peter Evans Quintet, hyperactive prog banjo/guitar shred with Seabrook Power Plant and provides hellish bass insanity to tubist Dan Peck’s improvised doom metal outfit The Gate, utilizes every trick in his book to underpin his wife’s apocalyptic musical narratives. The year 2012 promises to be an exciting year for the duo, as they plan an epic tour of North America in the fall and two tours of Europe in the spring and summer.