Josephine Foster performs solely with her electric guitar for her new album Domestic Sphere (7th April, Fire Records). The accompanying press suggests that she subverts the usual range of her voice to embody other frequencies and sounds beyond the surface layer of the songs. This can be heard on her first single, Pendulum, the video for which you can watch below.
In the world that Foster presents on Domestic Sphere, everything is music. The album is described as an extra-sensory radio play in two acts, where songs overlay structures like creeping vines. From the opening of Pendulum, natural sounds entwine her song, while the accompanying video is extended beyond the end of the song as if her words are set afloat and blown away by the wind, a feeling that Chris Davis also touches on:
Domestic Sphere is also a seance by song. Josephine channels sounds from her interior and exterior landscapes, whether integrating field recordings reflecting daily life in a Spanish village and other moments in her life as a nomadic musician, or, as in one tender cameo, the voice of her great-grandmother comes from the other side, framed in a union aided by her co-production with Daniel Blumberg. These songs are vigils, melodies sung intently, to be set aflame and sung off with the wind.
“Since first hearing it, I’ve been listening to Domestic Sphere on repeat. It cuts through every bad feeling I’ve been having and sends me into a place I want to live in always, which is art itself. Josephine Foster communes so completely with every sound on the record, with the past and the future, animals and insects and birds, those so tenderly dead, and those of us who are alive. I don’t say it lightly: listening to the record is a transcendent experience. It’s an exorcism, one that exorcises you.” Amina Cain
Track List
1. Entrance
2. Pendulum
3. Dawn Of Time
4. Burnt Offering
5. Entr’acte
6. Gentlemen & Ladies
7. Shrine Excerpt
8. Birthday Song For The Dead
9. Reminiscence
10. Haunted House
11. Sanctuary