Jonah Richard Guimond was 11 years old when he found an old Yamaha acoustic guitar in his parents’ closet. At around the same age, he also found a collection of Jimi Hendrix CDs in a 5$ bin at his local Radio Shack. Quite naively, he started to cover the songs of the electric guitar virtuoso on his acoustic guitar. And without knowing it, that’s how he brought P'tit Belliveau into the world.
Since then, the singer-songwriter from Nova Scotia's French-speaking community of Baie Sainte-Marie has been tackling music with the same candid, slightly out-of-touch approach. As a teenager, he substituted his CDs for the internet, an infinite source of random content that allowed him to discover the abundant work of artists as great and diverse as Johnny Cash, Hiroshi Sato and Flying Lotus.
Without any knowledge of music history, the young hip-hop producer mixes all his musical background with as much intuition as ingenuity on his first productions. And in a fitting turn of events, he crosses paths with Arthur Comeau, a founding member of Radio Radio, a band he had been listening to since childhood. Working alongside this pioneer of the Baie Ste-Marie hip-hop scene allowed the young Nova-Scotian to develop some of his skills as a musician and songwriter.
In 2017 and 2018, P'tit Belliveau unveiled himself as an artist with three country/bluegrass EPs featuring just the right amount of offbeat electronic arrangements. Emblematic of P'tit Belliveau's early releases, his lo-fi signature sound was first established through a string of pleasant but clumsy artistic decisions, before turning into a conscious, thought-out aesthetic statement. While waiting to learn how to record his music the right way, P'tit Belliveau assumes his artisanal side, without rushing things.
Later on in 2019, he was selected as one of three Francouvertes finalists, cementing his reputation in the public eye as a playful, skillful musician. The next year, with the help of producer Emmanuel Éthier, he released Greatest Hits Vol.1, an undeniably rich debut album that earned him Breakthrough Artist of the Year at the GAMIQ awards and Best Album Production at the ADISQ Gala.
Unable to sit back and relax, in 2021 the multi-instrumentalist releases ... chante Baptiste, a tribute EP to the late Baptiste Comeau, a cult singer-songwriter from his hometown with whom he shared the same DIY philosophy. Now, with a better understanding of what he's doing, P'tit Belliveau unveils his second full-length album, Un homme et son piano, on April 1st, 2022. Interacting with his fans via live streaming platforms such as Twitch, where he also pursues beatmaking, the artist continues to combine his love for rustic music and passion for electronic beats with a natural ease that never ceases to amaze.
