Suitcase Junket takes to the Treehouse

The Suitcase Junket, aka Matt Lorenz — artist, tinkerer, swamp yankee and one-man band — will perform a special one-night-only concert at 8 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 9 at the Treehouse Café.

From the salvaged sounds of American juke joints, back porches, honky tonks and rock clubs comes The Suitcase Junket.

Lorenz is the road-worn voice rising over the grind of a tube-amped dumpster guitar, with wild double pitches of throat singing thrown too.

From his penchant for thrift and ingenuity comes the recent full-length album — his debut at Signature Sounds — “Pile Driver,” made up of original rock anthems, mountain ballads, blues manifestos and dance-hall festivity, played on instruments built of broken bottles, twisted forks, dried bones, gas cans, shoes, saw blades, a toy keyboard, and an overhead compartment’s worth of luggage.

The Boston Globe said: “Not everyone can pull off the one-man-band gambit without lapsing into schtick, but Amherst’s Matt Lorenz has it all down to an art. The songs are what you remember.”

“His songwriting is extraordinary,” according to Sirius XM Radio. “[‘Pile Driver’] is one of the most exciting records I’ve heard in years.”

Lorenz was raised in Cavendish, Vermont, the son of teachers. He learned to sing by copying his sister Kate. Lorenz graduated from Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 2004, having taught himself to throat sing thanks to a South Indian cooking class. On moving day, he pulled his guitar, filled with mold and worse for wear, from a dorm Dumpster. He fixed it up and started pulling songs out of it.

Every show is a hard-driving, blues-grinding, throat-singing search and rescue junket. Sooner or later everything rusts, busts and gets tossed into the junk heap: iron, bones, muskrats, the heart, but Lorenz’s is there to recover it. To waste nothing. To create new ways from old.

Tickets, $15 for table seating, are on sale for this 21-and-older show. Visit www.treehousebainbridge.com to learn more.