Amber Arcades & Robin Kester
Dreamy indiefolk & hypnotic chamberpop
Amber Arcades is the moniker of Dutch musician Annelotte de Graaf. She makes dreamy indie folk and gives you a glimpse of her highly personal observations on life, love and how it all should or could work. Her music is comparable to Bon Iver and Lightning Dust, if it hasn’t sparked interest already, it should now!
Amber Arcades has played in VERA before, in 2013 they played at Noorderzon where VERA worked together with Lepel Concerts and a few years after that they shared the stage with Moss in the VERA Mainstage in 2017.
It was almost ten years ago when Annelotte de Graaf self-released a couple of EPs as Amber Arcades; pricking the bubble of ethereal dream pop on her eponymous debut, then donning a slow strum for the ‘Patiently’ EP. She was taking time out from her legal career in Utrecht, in the Netherlands, to tell tales of white fuzz and the meaningful patterns between unrelated random things, daydreaming onto alternative radios and into a studio in New York to record an album proper with Ben Greenberg on hand to colour in her personal observations of the world and its ‘Fading Lines’ (2016).
Amber Arcades’ ‘Barefoot On Diamond Road’, released on Fire Records in February 2023, is the antidote for heartbreak, conceived remotely with original sparring partner Ben Greenberg.
If fear keeps you from doing things, your world becomes smaller. Overcoming that fear by courting new, sometimes unnerving situations is the premise of Honeycomb Shades, the debut album by Dutch recording artist and musician Robin Kester. Kester’s experimental pop exudes a hazy euphoria and dark tension: the thrill of your synapses firing on all cylinders before turning into fully-formed thought.
Back in 2019 she played in the Downstage of VERA, where she already shared her beautiful dreamy voice with the crowd. Two years later she performed in the Mainstage of VERA, where she shared her then new mini-album ‘This Is Not A Democracy’, a dreamy lush production inspired by 70s pop music, a reference to Sufjan Stevens’ mysterious lullabies, indie pop by Cate Le Bon, dream pop by Beach House and the beauty of Weyes Blood.