Anders Griffen is a drummer, composer, and trumpet player from Brooklyn, New York. Griffen works in a range of contexts including folk, jazz, pop, improvised music, and modern dance theater.

Griffen is known for his work with songwriters and jazz musicians, playing the drum set sensitively and quietly enough to accompany acoustic music. His first appearance on record was in 1997, a tribute to Charles Moffett entitled Vision Blue with tenor saxophonist, Frank Lowe. Other notable artists that have sought Griffen’s accompaniment include Regina Spektor, Paleface, Jeffrey Lewis and Kimya Dawson, and their “super-group,” The Bundles , and bands like Dufus and Death to Anders.

In recent years Griffen has formed a partnership with singer-songwriter Diane Cluck. They perform as a duo and have toured the Pacific Northwest and the United Kingdom .

Regina Ilyinichna Spektor (Russian: Реги́нa Ильи́нична Спе́ктор, IPA: [rʲɪˈɡʲinə ˈspʲɛktər], English: /rɨˈdʒiːnə ˈspɛktər/; born February 18, 1980) is an American singer-songwriter and pianist. Her music is associated with the anti-folk scene centered in New York City's East Village.

Spektor was born in Moscow, Soviet Union in 1980 to a musical Russian Jewish family. Her father, Ilya Spektor, is a photographer and amateur violinist. Her mother, Bella Spektor, was a music professor in a Soviet college of music and now teaches at a public elementary school in Mount Vernon, New York. She has a brother Barry (Bear), who was featured in track 7, "* * *", or "Whisper", of her 2004 album, Soviet Kitsch.

She learned how to play piano by practising on a Petrof upright that was given to her mother by her grandfather. She was also exposed to the music of rock and roll bands such as The Beatles, Queen, and The Moody Blues by her father, who obtained such recordings in Eastern Europe and traded cassettes with friends in the Soviet Union. The family left the Soviet Union in 1989, when Regina was nine and a half, during the period of Perestroika, when Soviet citizens were permitted to emigrate. Regina had to leave her piano behind. The seriousness of her piano studies led her parents to consider not leaving the USSR, but they finally decided to emigrate, due to the ethnic and political discrimination that Jews faced. Spektor is fluent in Russian and reads Hebrew, and has since paid tribute to her Russian heritage, quoting the poem February by the Russian poet Boris Pasternak in her song Après Moi, and stating “I’m very connected to the language and the culture.”

Diane Cluck is an American singer-songwriter. She describes her music as "intuitive folk." She currently records in Virginia.

Cluck was raised in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She began taking piano lessons at the age of 7, and was classically trained on scholarship at the Pennsylvania Academy of Music.

Cluck began performing her songs publicly in New York City in 2000. She self-released her first solo album, Diane Cluck, that same year. By 2001, she was appearing regularly at the Sidewalk Cafe in New York's Lower East Side, a venue has featured such artists as Jeffrey Lewis, Regina Spektor, and Kimya Dawson. Massachusetts-based record label Important Records distributed her second and third albums, Macy's Day Bird in 2001 and Black With Green Leaves in 2002. Also in 2002, her song "Monte Carlo" was included in a compilation of New York Anti-folk music, Anti-folk Vol. 1, released by British label Rough Trade Records.

She wrote most of her fourth album, Oh Vanille / ova nil, while staying at the Dorland Mountain Arts Colony in Temecula, California in 2003. The album was distributed in 2004 by Important Records, and subsequently reissued on 180g audiophile vinyl pressed by 3 Syllables Records in 2010. Her fifth album, Countless Times, was distributed by Voodoo-Eros in 2005, and her sixth album, Monarcana, 2001-2004, was distributed in 2006 by Very Friendly.