When Adrianne Lenker says an artist’s “writing and voice are ethereal and angelic and guide me through internal canyons and plains,” you stop and take notice. Lenker (alongside Big Thief producer Andrew Sarlo) co-produced the debut album from Sydney, Australia-born singer/songwriter Indigo Sparke, who lives up to her collaborator’s praise on echo. Songs like “Colourblind” and “Carnival” draw the bulk of their power from Sparke’s bewitching vocals, with only sparse instrumentation to pull focus from her mystic storytelling—a deliberate decision she and Lenker made. “This record is an ode to death and decay. And the restlessness I feel to belong to something greater,” Spark explains. “Adrianne and I talked so much about keeping the record stripped back and simple, that is, we are all just constantly getting stripped back and humbled by life.” Listening to echo feels like standing in the shadow of an entity so large, you can’t see its entire outline, flooding you with fear, but also an unknowable awe.
Indigo Sparke brings her deeply personal lived experiences to her music, highlighting the spaces between the polarity of softness and grit. Pulling from her experiences of addiction, of healing, of queerness, of heartbreak, of joy, of connection, of the softness and of the grit alchemizing it all into tenderness through her music, she conjures up a myriad of feelings that is undeniably potent. Echo was co-produced by Sparke, Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenker and Andrew Sarlo, and features playing from Nick Hakim and Big Thief’s James Krivchenia.
The voice of Indigo Sparke feels fearless, but at moments it comes at a whisper. I was first taken by this Australian singer on a random journey, listening to around 1300 songs for last year’s SXSW music fest. Her song “the day i drove the car around the block” has a mundane title that made me smile, but lyrics that both cut hard and comfort. “Take off all my clothes, kiss me where the bruises are,” and later the refrain, “Love is the drug, and you are in my blood now.” Indigo told the NPR crowd about the song’s origins of trying to learn how to drive on the other side of the road while in Los Angeles, with a huge vehicle and a stick shift.
She just gave up and wrote this tale of defeat and solace. On her third song, a tune that was so new at the time of this performance it had no title (now it’s called “Burn”), she’s joined on guitar by her partner, Adrianne Lenker of Big Thief. It all made for a most intimate and sincere expression of honest emotion and a beautiful day with friends in the office.
SET LIST: “Colourblind” “the day i drove the car around the block” “Burn” MUSICIANSIndigo Sparke: vocals, guitar; Adrianne Lenker: guitar
Indigo Sparke From the album Echo, out February 19th 2021, via Sacred Bones Records
The third single from Australian artist Indigo Sparke’s forthcoming debut album “Echo” , “Colourblind” is an intimate, yet expansive indie-folk track on which Big Thief songwriter, solo artist and Echo co-producer Adrianne Lenker makes her presence felt. Sparke’s stunning vocals are sandwiched between soft electric guitar on one side and rustic acoustic chords on the other as she sings, “There’s a knowing in your eyes / There’s a truth behind my lies,” stretching that last syllable for what feels like miles. Indeed, the song has a distinctly pastoral, wide-open appeal to it, particularly in the whistled outro—you half-expect a tumbleweed to blow through the track, and its Paris, Texas-inspired video (co-directed by Sparke and DP Monica Buscarino) only adds to the effect. It’s rare to encounter a young singer/songwriter with that sort of transportive power. “I think there was a period of time when I was almost laughing at how sad I was in the space of ambiguous liminal love.
If you don’t start laughing, you just cry more,” Sparke says of the song. “Its a feeling when you are kind of sick to your stomach and anxious but excited and not knowing what the fuck is going on. The space of waiting. Waiting to know someone else’s truth, or waiting to see someone, or waiting to see what the future holds for you and that person, or waiting to see if it’s even real. Everything becomes that person, everything reminds you of that person, everything speaks that persons name. It’s a bittersweet thing.
Indigo Sparke brings her deeply personal lived experiences to her music, highlighting the spaces between the polarity of softness and grit. Pulling her experiences of addiction, of healing, of queerness, of heartbreak, of joy, of connection, of the softness and of the grit alchemising it all into tenderness through her music, she conjures up a myriad of feelings that is undeniably potent. Indigo was born in the belly of Sydney, Australia straight into the heart of a family with music in their bones. Her parents, a jazz singer and a musician, named her after the Duke Ellington song “Mood Indigo,” and her childhood was spent serenaded by a rich soundtrack of Joni Mitchell and Neil Young. From a young age Indigo felt called to the stage, attending a performing arts high school, and followed it with three years in an acting school, working as an actress before embedding herself and heeding the call to the path of music.
Indigo taught herself to play guitar in her early twenties. Over the next few years, she established herself on the Australian music scene, and released her EP “Night Bloom” in 2016. Indigo’s career continually bloomed, opening for Big Thief on the Australian dates of their 2017/ 2018 tour, and then was invited to play at South by Southwest 2019. There, NPR’s Bob Boilen was first taken by Indigo, writing that her lyrics ”both cut hard and comfort” and that her performance “balanced heavy, reverb-drenched verses with moments of airy and acoustic whispers.” Sparke began 2020 with a February Tiny Desk Concert at NPR, and had been booked as the opening act for Big Thief’s sold-out tour of Australia and New Zealand, including a scheduled performance at the Sydney Opera House before Covid-19 saw everything change.
It was in 2019 that Indigo lived and travelled across America, in places like NYC, Minneapolis, Topanga, Taos, in many hotel rooms and amidst the vast stretching landscapes on the never ending highways, channelling her creative energy into the completion of her latest album, “echo”. “echo” was recorded between LA, Italy and New York, co-produced by Sparke, Adrianne Lenker (of Big Thief), and Andrew Sarlo (producer of Big Thief, Nick Hakim, Hovvdy, Courtney Marie Andrews, Bon Iver, Hand Habits, Active Child). The record was completed at Figure 8 Studio in New York City, studio of musician Shahzad Ismaily. Phil Weinrobe (producer/engineer for Leonard Cohen, Damien Rice, Adrianne Lenker, Buck Meek, JFDR, and Lonnie Holley) engineered and mixed the album. Of this incredibly deep and intimate record, Indigo says, “When writing and recording the record, I wondered how it would all come together. I felt like I was standing back in the desert, looking up at the blue night sky, wondering how all the stars would connect. I think sometimes it’s the dark matter or void space between them, that holds it all together.
This record is an ode to death and decay. And the restlessness I feel to belong to something greater. Adrianne and I talked so much about keeping the record stripped back and simple, that is, we are all just constantly getting stripped back and humbled by life.” Indigo’s art searches for the vulnerability that comes with a feeling of true safety, a vulnerability that can grant access to a world behind tangible experience. It is clear Indigo has lived and woven her many lives into these songs, telling us, “I feel and have often felt a million different women ramble and reconfigure the corners of my mind and soul. I think in my life, I have ricocheted off so many different walls within myself. It’s an endless search to understand the mysteries of life and love and history. As soon as you think you’ve got it, it’s gone. Sometimes I feel so thin. Sometimes I feel so robust. I think that comes through the music.” “I feel that death and time hang over me like questions, I have felt the shimmer and the edge for so long now but what I long for are the worlds of safety and safe love. There are so many windows in life to look through and so many ways to heal and express. My photography, poetry and music, were born at a juncture mirroring different parts of me. I see and feel visually, I am obsessed with immortalizing memory.”
Indigo Sparke – the album “Echo”, out February 19th 2021, via Sacred Bones Records
Making for quite the meta experiment, the fictional cult leader from BC filmmaker Panos Cosmatos ‘ Mandy, Jeremiah Sand, is getting set to release an album this month called “Left It Down”. To give you a better idea what the leader of the Children of the New Dawn has in store for us, he’s now given us a video for the record’s “Golden Desert.”
In 1974, Jeremiah Sand and his nascent cult The Children Of The New Dawn decamp LA for the Shasta Mountain region and Redding, CA. They set up shop, begin printing leaflets, hold gatherings and start growing their ranks through recruitment. Jeremiah and the Children are not necessarily an odd addition to Redding in 1974. Since the 1930s, psychonauts and spiritual seekers have been drawn to this area in Northern California under the shadow of the dormant volcanic cone of Shasta. By 1974, urban California hippies worn down by direct political engagement with state security forces have started drifting North and the towns along the border with Oregon state are filled with ad-hoc spiritual organizations, commune builders and lost souls. Jeremiah and the Children fit right in. A few years prior to assembling his flock, Sand had self produced and released an album of psych-folk that was unremarkable in almost every way, save for the unrelenting vanity and egoism on display in the lyrics.
This early album is one of the only existing documents of Sand. The commercial failure of the album became the catalyst for Sand to leave Southern California and settle in a place where his “truth” would be “received by pure and open hearts”. By mid 1974, the Children have grown in rank and Jeremiah becomes obsessed with recording “his masterpiece”…a musical message to the world, communicating a “Truth” that only he has been given spiritual access to. This project becomes the central focus of the Children. His lieutenant Brother Swann overhears that there is a small recording studio just North of the city. He arrives one day at the reception with a large gym bag full of cash and instructs the owner to cancel all sessions on the books. The studio will now focus on one thing and one thing only: helping Jeremiah realize his vision. Tents and rough structures appear on the surrounding property as the Children make the studio and its grounds their new home. They hold recruitment meetings where Jeremiah evangelizes in between endless recording sessions. The owner and his staff begin to feel as though they’re being held hostage but the money is good and the Children keep paying. Overpaying. This goes on for years. New members drift into the sessions. A disgraced professor from the Electro Acoustic Music program at Evergreen state arrives with a full Buchla system he’s “liberated” from the university, Jeremiah is entranced by it and for a few weeks the only sounds coming from the studio are blasts of atonal, corroded noise underpinned by ominous chanting. The mood changes. The town begins to turn against the Children. A few people have gone missing. Some teenagers. A studio engineer. By the Spring of 1977, the entire session has broken down into hallucinogen and cocaine fuelled chaos. Bad vibrations. One night in early March, after a particularly grueling mixing session, the producer and owner of the studio is startled awake by an extremely agitated looking Brother Swann. Swann is sweating and wild eyed, casually holding a gun, explaining to the producer that “plans have changed” and that Jeremiah has “heard a calling and a Great Summons”. They are leaving. All of them. That night. Swann directs the producer to put the existing reels in a lock box along with a short 16mm film, lyrics, album art and scribbled notes. Swann tells the producer Jeremiah will be back to finish his masterpiece. It all goes in the box and it’s not to be opened until the Children return. They never do.
In 2018, wildfires rip through Redding, CA and burns it to the ground. Over a thousand of homes are incinerated. One rough structure north of the city is partially saved. There’s a massive concrete basement filled with smoke and water damaged recording equipment and in the back…a lockbox.
No one knows who originally took the tapes out of the charred ruin of the studio but in a few months, a very strange album is making the rounds in the more esoteric circles of the underground. A long and confusing chain of custody ensues. A lost artifact of the transitional period between the late 60s and late 70s. A flawed and malignant sounding unfinished thing, clearly the product of a psychotically inflated ego and hubris. The album is by turns: amateurish, haunting, deranged, ridiculous and (for those attuned to these things) filled with crackling negative psychic energies. So much so that Light In The Attic flat out refuses to reissue it. Eventually, it lands in Calebs lap and Sacred Bones decides to restore the audio and give it a general release all in the name of preserving a historical document of a very weird place and a very weird time.
2020 Jeremiah Sand under Exclusive License to Sacred Bones
For over a decade, Nika Roza Danilova has been recording music as Zola Jesus. She’s been on Sacred Bones Records for most of that time, and “Okovi” marks her reunion with the label.
Fittingly, the 11 electronics-driven songs on Okovi share musical DNA with her early work on Sacred Bones. The music was written in pure catharsis, and as a result, the sonics are heavy, dark, and exploratory. In addition to the contributions of Danilova’s longtime live bandmate Alex DeGroot, producer/musician Wife, cellist/noise-maker Shannon Kennedy from Pedestrian Deposit, and percussionist Ted Byrnes all helped build Okovi’s textural universe.
With Okovi, Zola Jesus has crafted a profound meditation on loss and reconciliation that stands tall alongside the major works of its genre. The album speaks of tragedy with great wisdom and clarity. Its songs plumb dark depths, but they reflect light as well. Nika Roza says Last year, I moved back to the woods in Wisconsin where I was raised. I built a little house just steps away from where my dilapidated childhood tree fort is slowly recombining into earth. Okovi was fed by this return to roots and several very personal traumas.
While writing Okovi, I endured people very close to me trying to die, and others trying desperately not to. Meanwhile, I was fighting through a haze so thick I wasn’t sure I’d find my way to the other side. Death, in all of its masks, has been encircling everyone I love, and with it the questions of legacy, worth, and will. Okovi is a Slavic word for shackles. We’re all shackled to something—to life, to death, to bodies, to minds, to illness, to people, to birthright, to duty. Each of us born with a unique debt, and we have until we die to pay it back. Without this cost, what gives us the right to live? And moreover, what gives us the right to die? Are we really even free to choose?
This album is a deeply personal snapshot of loss, reconciliation, and a sympathy for the chains that keep us all grounded to the unforgiving laws of nature. To bring it to life, I decided to enlist the help of Alex DeGroot, who has been the only constant in my live band and helped mix the Stridulum EP back in 2010. It will be released on Sacred Bones, the closest group of people I’ll ever have to blood-bound family. Zola Jesus signed to Sacred Bones in 2008. In the seven years that followed, we released eight albums together (three LPs, two EPs, two 7”s, a CD-R, and even a DVD). We discovered her via Myspace, which was the common A&R vehicle of the early- to mid-Aughts. Nika is the sole member of Zola Jesus.
To celebrate the tenth anniversary of Moon Duo’s long-out-of-print debut LP “Escape”, Sacred Bones is proud to present a new deluxe version of the album.
The new reissue will include the original album in its entirety, plus three additional rare tracks taken from Moon Duo’s wild early days. Reflecting on the album in March 2020, the band shared the following statement: “We made this record in a rehearsal space in San Francisco in late 2009. It was kind of a classic band space, shared by a rangy assortment of musicians over months and years, behind one of several similar doors in a dark red hall. A windowless room lit by string lights and an odd assortment of lamps, the walls a palimpsest of posters and gig fliers.
The band shared the following statement on the 10th anniversary of the album: “We made this record in a rehearsal space in San Francisco in late 2009. It was kind of a classic band space, shared by a rangy assortment of musicians over months and years, behind one of several similar doors in a dark red hall. A windowless room lit by string lights and an odd assortment of lamps, the walls a palimpsest of posters and gig fliers. There was a grimy, burn-pocked rug, cluttered gear in various stages of use and abandonment, and the air seemed to hang in a permanent film of smoke residue and stale beer. We recorded to a 4-track tape machine over the course of a few nights – we’d just start the beats, hit ‘record’ and let fly. We had a vague sense of coalescence, or fomentation, like a glimpse of a thing in outline which you can’t yet see, but neither of us knew at the time that this was the record that would mark the beginning of our life as a touring band and would initiate our connections to so many (now long-time) friends, familiars and collaborators. Ten years feels like both a lifetime and the blink of an eye – measurable but impossible to quantify. These four tracks, and the others that join them here, are a snapshot of our earliest incarnation: flying blind, but high on the freedom of experimentation and filled with hope for things to come.”
At first listen, “The Practice of Love”, Jenny Hval’s seventh full-length album, unspools with an almost deceptive ease. Across the eight tracks, filled with arpeggiated synth washes and the kind of lilting beats that might have drifted, loose and unmoored, from some forgotten mid-’90s trance single, The Practice of Love feels, first and foremost, compellingly humane. Given the horror and viscera of her previous album, 2016’s Blood Bitch, The Practice of Love is almost subversive in its gentleness—a deep dive into what it means to grow older, to question one’s relationship to the earth and one’s self, and to hold a magnifying glass over the notion of what intimacy can mean.
As Hval describes it, the album charts its own particular geography, a landscape in which multiple voices engage and disperse, and the question of connectedness—or lack thereof—hangs suspended in the architecture of every song. It is,an album about “seeing things from above—almost like looking straight down into the ground, all of these vibrant forest landscapes, the type of nature where you might find a porn magazine at a certain place in the woods and everyone would know where it was, but even that would just become rotting paper, eventually melting into the ground.”
“Look at these trees/ Look at this grass/ Look at those clouds … Study this/ And ask yourself/ Where is God?” Leave it to Jenny Hval to open an album with words that could’ve been lifted from a self-help mindfulness exercise and turn them into an existential reckoning. The Practice Of Love grapples with all kinds of questions, as any of Hval’s work does. But at the same time as Hval remains thought-provoking, she’s now housed these meditations in futuristic pop songs like “High Alice” and “Ashes To Ashes,” locating an accessibility and infectiousness we might not have ever expected from her. The Practice Of Love is a thing of shimmering beauty throughout, but perhaps this is its most moving takeaway: constant searching leading to new thoughts and new sounds, history and memory and life lived stoking yet another evolution.
From ‘The Practice of Love,’ out September. 13th, 2019. Sacred Bones Records
“Stars Are the Light”, the luminous seventh album by the American psych explorers Moon Duo, marks a progression into significantly new territory. From a preoccupation with the transcendental and occult that informed Ripley Johnson and Sanae Yamada’s guitar-driven psych rock, and reached its apotheosis in the acclaimed Occult Architecture diptych, Stars Are the Light sees the band synthesize the abstract and metaphysical with the embodied and terrestrial. Branching out from Occult Architecture Vol. 2, the album has a sonic physicality that is at once propulsive and undulating; it puts dance at the heart of an expansive nexus that connects the body to the stars. These are songs about embodied human experience — love, change, misunderstanding, internal struggle, joy, misery, alienation, discord, harmony, celebration — rendered as a kind of dance of the self, both in relation to other selves and to the eternal dance of the cosmos. Taking disco as its groove-oriented departure point, Stars Are the Light shimmers with elements of ’70s funk and ’90s rave. Johnson’s signature guitar sound is at its most languid and refined, while Yamada’s synths and oneiric vocals are foregrounded to create a spacious percussiveness that invites the body to move with its mesmeric rhythms. With Sonic Boom (Spacemen 3, Spectrum) at the mixing desk in Portugal’s Serra de Sintra, (known to the Romans as “The Mountains of the Moon”) the area’s lush landscape and powerful lunar energies exerted a strong influence on the vibe and sonic texture of the album. On embracing disco as an inspiration, Yamada says, “It’s something we hadn’t referenced in our music before, but its core concepts really align with what we were circling around as we made the album.
We were also very inspired by the space and community of a disco – a space of free self-expression through dance, fashion, and mode of being; where everyone was welcome, diversity was celebrated, and identity could be fluid; where the life force that animates each of us differently could flower.”
From ‘Stars Are the Light,’ out September. 27th.out on Sacred Bones Records.
Norwegian avant-garde musician Jenny Hval has announced a new album, “The Practice of Love”, and shared its first single, “Ashes to Ashes.” The Practice of Love is due out September 13 via Sacred Bones.
The album is the follow-up to her acclaimed 2016 album, Blood Bitch, and her 2018 EP, The Long Sleep. The album features guest vocalists Vivian Wang, Laura Jean Englert, and Félicia Atkinson. The title The Practice of Love was partially inspired by Valie Export’s 1985 film of the same name.
Hval had this to say about the album in a press release: “This all sounds very clichéd, like a standard greeting card expression. But for me, love, and the practice of love, has been deeply tied to the feeling of otherness. Love as a theme in art has been the domain of the canonized, big artists, and I have always seen myself as a minor character, a voice that speaks of other things. But in the last few years I have wanted to take a closer look at the practice of otherness, this fragile performance, and how it can express love, intimacy, empathy and desire. I have wanted to ask bigger, wider, kind of idiotic questions like: What is our job as a member of the human race? Do we have to accept this job, and if we don’t, does the pressure to be normal ever stop?”
From ‘The Practice of Love,’ out September. 13th, 2019.
I have a new side-project, Droneflower, out on Sacred Bones Records with my friend Stephen Brodsky. Steve, a fellow Massachusetts native and member of Cave In and Mutoid Man, worked on this full length collaboration mostly at my old apartment in Jamaica Plain and some at his place in Brooklyn. We co-produce this album and I can’t wait for you to hear the whole thing!
Brodsky met Nadler for the first time in 2014 at Brooklyn’s Saint Vitus Bar when he came to see her play on her July tour, and they quickly became friends. Both of them had been wanting to explore songwriting that didn’t fit into their existing projects, and they soon became energized by the prospect of working together. One of the first ideas they discussed was a horror movie soundtrack, and while Droneflower isn’t that, it is a richly cinematic album. It’s easy to imagine much of the record set to images, though it wasn’t composed that way.
The first song that came together was “Dead West,” based around a beautiful acoustic guitar piece Brodsky wrote while living on Spy Pond, just outside of Nadler’s home base in Boston. By the time they started working on the song earnest, Brodsky had moved to Brooklyn. Nadler added lyrics and vocal melodies remotely, and even from a distance it was obvious there was real kismet in the collaboration.
“It’s is a sprawling and expansive exercise in contrasts. It is the sound of the war between the brutal and the ethereal, the dark and the light, the past and the present, and the real and imagined.” The limited edition sold out really fast of this, but the vinyl is available at Sacred Bones. You can also order a limited edition by joining the Sacred BonesRecord Society : Edition of 150 hand-numbered copies, comes with alternate screen printed, wrap around sleeve, wax sealed LP pressed on Society-exclusive clear-and-yellow marble vinyl and with Society-exclusive mixed tape,
All the songs on Droneflower were recorded in home studios.
I hope you are all having a nice winter so far and staying warm as the cold sets in. I directed and animated a video for my song “Said Goodbye To That Car,” off of my newest album For My Crimes. You can watch it below. For My Crimes is out now on Sacred Bones Records and Bella Union Records.
I’m contributing to Mercury Rev’s recreation of the Bobby Gentry album Delta Sweete. including it’s insane lineup of contributors. It’s out February 8th via Partisan/Bella Union. Each song features a different singer. Guest vocalists include Margo Price, Mazzy Star’s Hope Sandoval, Vashti Bunyan, Lucinda Williams, Phoebe Bridgers, Norah Jones, Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell, Stereolab’s Lætitia Sadier, Marissa Nadler, M83’s Kaela Sinclair, and more.
The Fat Angel Sings 