ES:MO Celebrates the Release of Sunshine in My Bones
By Heather Bambrick2026/05/21
Michael Occhipinti & Elizabeth Shepherd
We all know the phrase, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. It applies to so many things, including the effortless collaboration of these two outstanding musicians, Elizabeth Shepherd and Michael. Occhipinti The two began working together several years ago on respective solo projects and in doing so, they realized that there was a genuine creative sympatico that they shared which resulted in the creation of ES:MO. It’s a duo that blurs the boundaries of musical genres, dances between improvisational elements of jazz, the uniqueness of their original music and grooves you can hear.
Their latest recording, Sunshine in My Bones, was released on May 15 and they’ll be celebrating the release at Hugh’s Room Live this Saturday, May 23.
Your style is considered on your website as “genre-less creativity.” Do genres matter anymore? Do we care about categories anymore?
Elizabeth Shepherd (ES): I think it’s a marketing thing that’s necessary that you need to know where to put this so people who are interested in that specific label will find it. But I tend to think that we’re all curious beings, we all like different types of music and none of us stick to one thing exclusively so in that sense I do think that genres are a bit of a construct and have always been.
In an era where technology is something that we deal with on a day-to-day basis, how does it affect your thinking around music?
Michael Occhipinti: With this record, we did a little bit because there are some specific samples and things that we wrote around. There’s literally one song we wrote based on a sample of a washing machine at the Banff Centre for the Arts. Elizabeth has asked me to put her laundry in the dryer and as I was walking out, I heard the sound of the machines and I was like “That’s cool!” so I recorded it and then went to our cabin and we were like ‘yes, let’s write something to this.;
So that song needs a sample but at the same time, I think we both wanted to be really organic. When I use pedals with my guitar playing, I try to make it as an extension of my playing, so it’s not so much as I’m stepping on this button now, but it’s more like I’m going to produce this song in this way around Elizabeth’s voice, I see myself wrapping the guitar around her voice while trying to create interesting layers underneath what she does. We both improvise with that stuff and we like the surprise that comes out of that.
Elizabeth: I feel like we both had this approach in the studio, both at Banff and at the Treehouse Studios in Quebec, let’s not think to hard about where we’re going with this, let’s just have fun and play with it.So you get these really creative extremes of stuff that you wouldn’t come up with if you didn’t hae those lack of parameters. You’re not even writing songs at that point, so let’s just make sounds and see where it goes.
ES:MO Album Release Concert takes place on Saturday, May 23 at Hugh’s Room Live. Tickets are available here.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
