Drag City’s Faun Fables has just announced a new 4-song EP, A Table Forgotten, which will be released on July 22. While you wait, check out this video for the song “With Words and Cake” from the upcoming EP.

With the haunting melodies and traditional instrumentation of traditional British Isles folk (cello, harp, fiddle, acoustic guitar) underpinning Margie Wienk’s delicate vocals, Fern Knight’s new self-titled album evokes themes as disparate as man’s communion with nature to a story of twins who escape from the circus. Carrying the sonic ambition and bucolic palette of early seventies prog while maintaining a decidedly humble and atmospheric demeanor, Fern Knight’s new songs ache with emotions that run the gamut from funereal to whimsical.

I met up with Fern Knight and Ex Reverie at the Silverlake Lounge in Los Angeles last night and shot an interview and exclusive unplugged performance of Fern Knight’s new tunes “Magpie Suite, Part II and III”. Stay tuned to naturalismo, as I’ll be posting the beautiful footage soon. The new album is being released this upcoming Tuesday, May 13, so be sure to catch Fern Knight and Ex Reverie as they journey up the West Coast.

[download] “Magpie Suite Part II” + “Magpie Suite Part III“

[Fern Knight Official Site] [Ex Reverie Official Site]

Photo (c) Alissa Anderson

The release of Vetiver’s new album “Thing of the Past” is a week away but you can get your first listen of it today on Naturalismo. The collection of songs featured on the new all covers album doesn’t just cover the proven classic ground that many covers albums often wander into but also treads into the more obscure on tracks such as Dia Joyce’s “Sleep a Million Years”. I’ve also done my best to collect all of the original songs here in one place for you all to download. Now you can allow yourself to get familiar with the artists and their songs before you hear Andy Cabic’s wonderful recompositions of them. I’ve heard scattered rumours that the entire original collection may be released as a full album next year so I have to leave some of the original songs for the hunters or possibly forthcoming official comp. P.S. if you find the original songs that I haven’t posted please send them in because they were impossible to find. ALSO: Stay tuned for a full video interview with Vetiver, we’re filming tonight in L.A. and should have it up by Monday.

First listen (No officially released single yet = here’s a roundup of links to other blogs with them):

Vetiver - Houses

Vetiver - Road to Ronderlin

Vetiver - Blue Driver

Get Familiar:

(Tracklisting below)

Download: Vetiver “Thing of the Past” original songs compilation

Download Mirror 2: Vetiver “Thing of the Past” original songs compilation

Pre-Order Vetiver’s ‘Thing of the Past’ on Amazon here.

It’s strange to think that it took a Swede to capture the spirit of American folk music, or at least come the closest to imitating it. But with the recent release of Shallow Grave, the debut LP from Sweden’s own The Tallest Man on Earth, Americana has been given the Swedish touch, sans clogs. With his ramshackle delivery, nimble fingerpicking, and whimsical lyrics (not to mention the “mysteriously” cryptic press photos of the singer with rolled jeans and bare chest), you get a sense that the Tallest Man on Earth has spent a lot of time absorbing Harry Smith’s Anthology of Folk Music and Dylan’s The Times They Are a-Changin’ - without the latter’s overt socio-political commentary. Like Dylan, who aped the musical and visual style of his pre-war forebears but later developed his own sound, the Tallest Man on Earth is a highly gifted singer-songwriter who may be a bit derivative, but what music isn’t?

[download] “Pistol Dreams“

[Tallest Man MySpace]

Thank you Devendra and Lauren Dukoff!

[Janet Jackon Rolling Stone cover by Patrick Demarchelier]

In the seventh decade of the twentieth century, a cultural phenomenon swept this great country - nay, the world - faster than the common cold in a subway car full of sneezers. No, I’m not referring to wide lapels or polyester pants. I’m referring to disco. But before you scoff or tilt your shaggy-haired heads back in disgust, shall we revisit the antiquated sounds of disco’s greatest golden hits through the lens of one today’s most enchanting performers? Yes, we shall.

The Seven Inch Project has just released a limited edition vinyl pressing of two classic disco covers from Gnomonsong’s own Rio En Medio, aka Danielle Stech-Homsy. From their site:

“The inspiration for these disco covers came to Danielle as she was promenading through the local West Indian grocery store in Flatbush, Brooklyn. It was late and Danielle was exhausted from work. As her dazed eyes drifted over bruised plantains she suddenly became aware of a song that was playing on the radio. For days the melody filled Danielle’s head and obsessed her imagination. She had only caught a few words but managed to dig it up on the Internet…”Let this groove get you to move…It’s alright…alright…a-a-al-right.” Weeks later Danielle found herself in a Montreal hotel tapping the beat out on the desk in her room, trying to be as quiet as possible so as not to alert the staff to her nefarious recording activity. The song, one could say, had bewitched her. It had awakened a certain hitherto obscured spirit inside her that, once unleashed, had the power to change her, which it did, causing Danielle to abandon her current life in pursuit of a more dangerous personal freedom and aliveness that she had never known. That’s when she understood DISCO - what must have moved so many people, as silly as it now seems to many of us - the magical hold it had on being Alive, struggling against the odds, and for no reason other than to feel something moving in your body and soul…

[download] “Let’s Groove” (Original by Earth, Wind, and Fire)

[buy the vinyl]

Click below for current European tour dates with CocoRosie!

Just in from Marissa Nadler:

“So, I have fought off the urge to put any of my new material online so I can save it for the record. Its hard because there is the desire to get feedback from other people and it is so easy and quick with the Internet these days. So, my apologies for keeping the same stuff up for a while. I record the actual record in June in a carriage house in Connecticut. Its exciting because I feel a lot has changed.”

[download] “honey of the bee” (Unreleased demo)

[photo © Yoon S. Byun]

Joanna Newsom talks fashion and tells a joke to Paper Magazine:

The sun is hiding. The air cools, just enough. And the clouds are ripe. They seem intent on rain but never quite commit to it; the whole world seems overcast. Sharon Van Etten’s music is that milky light spilled through half-drawn curtains, borne in the heart of October wind.

[download] “have you seen” + “you didn’t really do that“

[Sharon Van Etten myspace]

]]> http://naturalismo.wordpress.com/2008/04/30/sharon-van-etten/feed/ =tyler= http://naturalismo.wordpress.com/2008/04/29/festival-come-arrow-come/ http://naturalismo.wordpress.com/2008/04/29/festival-come-arrow-come/#comments Tue, 29 Apr 2008 18:41:18 +0000 =tyler= http://naturalismo.wordpress.com/?p=600

To say the word “Festival” is to summon myriad imagery: revelers hoarsely singing songs over jugs of wine, dancing, sharing, smiling, laughing, and enjoying that rare sense of community that has, as we move further and further into the 21st century, been replaced by insularity. But is the imagery of the festival lost? Antiquated? Romanticized? Yes, of course. There are, however, threads of that quilt left behind - captured periodically on record as a dusty reminder of the human animal’s potential for interconnectivity. In the realm of family, in the voices of siblings, you can not only sense the connection between performers in the studio, but you can hear the sympathetic vibration of vocal cords united by the glue of genetics.

Such is the case on Language of Stone’s recent release by Festival, Come Arrow Come! The songs are stitched together lovingly and admirably by the band’s core duo, sisters Lindsay and Alexis. Despite a lack of overt musical complexity, the sisters’ charming blend of chamber pop, folk, and psychadelia finds its strength in blood.

[download] “Boxcar” + “Blown Light“

[Festival on myspace]

[photo © rebecca gillespie]