For her austere new album Domestic Sphere, Josephine Foster performs solely with her electric guitar and then subverts the usual range of her voice to embody other frequencies and sounds beyond the surface layer of the songs.
“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
Josephine Foster’s Domestic Sphere is an altar cloth of songs stitched together as liturgical music for a restless homestead, whose values insist simply that everything is music and that our daily life is a sacred, innately creative practice. In such a world creaking doors reveal natural orchestras with wailing cats in service of melodic collaborations with Tennessee songbirds, Foster’s world is an extra-sensory radio play in two acts, where songs overlay structures like creeping vines.
“Foster possesses an esoteric wisdom and an ascetic purity” The Wire
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.
– Chris Davis
Josephine Foster has also been announced for Green Man Festival & Supersonic Festival, check her live dates below:
Out 7th April. Available on Black Vinyl and CD.
