Toronto’s Alt-Folk Dante Ravenhearst Releases Full Debut EP, Half Sun / Half Moon
Toronto-based musician Danté Ravenhearst follows the success of her debut single, “Asphalt” (featured in Canadian Beats, Crooked Forest, Eclectic Music Lover, and playlists from Exclaim! and Music Mecca) with her debut EP, Half Sun / Half Moon. Featuring atmospheric folk instrumentation, shimmering percussion, somber pedal steel, organ, and acoustic guitar, Half Sun / Half Moon is an exploration of the mourning of connections both before and after they are lost alongside their haunting correlation with environmental grief.
The recording of Half Sun / Half Moon in November 2023 was a labour of friendship between Ravenhearst and a group of close Toronto and Hamilton-based session musicians, Ben McWebb, Kurt van Bendegem, and Jonathan Horvath. A mutual love for the rawness of classic country and folk music production brought Ravenhearst and producer, Matt Fasullo creatively together. Fasullo’s self-produced work occupies the atmospheric alternative indie folk rock space, pulling the traditional country-folk elements of Half Sun / Half Moon into a fresh, contemporary context, a marriage of old and new.
“I am really entranced by the correlation of loss between our emotional and environmental spaces – with climate grief as an active part of our lived experience now, the relationships we mourn are oftentimes associated with a physical environment that also no longer exists,” says Ravenhearst of the thread of the environmental and emotional grief that flows through her music.