TICKETS
Doors 7 // Music 8
North American artist Josephine Foster (b. 1974): singer, multi-instrumentalist, song composer. Known to breathe new life into archaic forms, embodying the cultural archaeology of Harry Smith’s old weird America, she has lent her warbling mezzo-soprano and interpretive wit to nearly two decades of self-produced recordings.
As Jarry said, anachronism, the crossing of different times, produces eternity, and anachronic is an apt arch-adjective to describe Foster’s singular songbook, one that began in the Mountain West (where at age 15 she had her first gig delivering hymns at a log cabin church). Her uncanny timbre imparts a paradoxically rustic glamour, despite a certain stage shyness.
In her 20’s, submerged into Chicago’s fringe rock and free jazz periphery, frayed vestiges of her abandoned operatic aspirations wore away; she then crossed the Atlantic for over a decade, grounding herself in the earthen glaze of rural Spain. A glitter of Nashville recording residencies helped shape her prolific output, solo and band album releases, leading a variety of ensembles on the road around the world and in the studio.
Foster draws from spiritual wells beyond limits of space and time, her performances mesmeric. An oneiric voice which entwines with her own swelling guitar, piano, harp and autoharp gestures, folk-art songs spun in surprising musical design, are often playfully unravelled. And while she favors the piano or organ, she will probably play whatever guitar is handed to her.
The sophomore effort from Gray/Smith refines their petroleum-based, hard-lullaby sound with a decidedly dusty precision. Formed in the outer-edges of Kings and Richmond counties circa 2020, Gray/Smith is something of an East-coast involution. L. Gray (guitar and vocals) and Rob Smith (drums, guitar and vocals) are both trusty veterans of “band’s bands” like Pigeons, No-Neck Blues Band, Rhyton, and the Suntanama, freewheeling groups known for mining from polyglot sources: rough-hewn folk and the spiritual avant-garde, bargain-bin hard rock and and collector’s-choice psychedelia alike. On their first, self-released LP Gray/Smith, serendipitously recorded at Gary’s Electric at the top of 2021, the pair trained their assured chops onto the great American song-form, honing a murky but tight approach that variously cribs “urban cowboy” and finger-picked primitivism.
To call this pair’s brand of country-rock détournement “cosmic” would be too breezy: L. Gray and Rob Smith prefer to stare into sunken depths, channeling their recondite affections for lay-by mauve zones and red-dirt guitar wanderings. Heels in the Aisle is the slipshod, burnt-out, mid-’70s unter-prog comedown to their debut’s backwoods, bushy-tailed, early-’70s, country-rock meanderings. For fans of Meat Puppets, Ronnie Milsap, Traffic’s John Barleycorn Must Die, the oceanic ebullience of the sacred, and the salty tang of the profane.
