Josephine Foster + Stella Kola + Ceremonial Abyss

Josephine Foster is a Colorado composer and performer whose “music plays games with our ideas of time and space” says The Guardian. The Nashville Scene describes her work a ”fusion of art song and American folk music” and the former opera student is “known to breathe new life into archaic forms, embodying the cultural archaeology of Harry Smith’s old weird America, and has lent her characteristic mezzo-soprano and interpretive wit to over two decades of recordings” writes Blank Forms.

Josephine has released some twenty albums, each song cycle drawn from her own singular songbook, performed solo or leading various ensembles (occasionally under band guises: Mendrugo, the Supposed, Born Heller.)  Peripheral but not insignificant are her unorthodox arrangements of 19th century German Lieder, the folkloric collection of Lorca, or her musical settings of Dickinson and other poets. Foster is a poet herself, as well as visual artist. On her latest offering  Domestic Sphere , Josephine 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 .

Critical Acclaim:

A “Vibrating Voice to Shake the Soul” -NPR

"You might call Ms. Foster’s eerie warbling old-fashioned, except that it evokes a scrambled past that exists only in her own vision: mountain songs that never were, spaced-out hybrids that never will be."  – The New York Times

Hailing from the misty grottos and orchards of Western Massachusetts, Stella Kola weave haunting ballads that dig deep into the psychedelic-folk tradition while shapeshifting into captivating new forms. Stella Kola began in 2019 as a songwriting project between the singer / poet Beverly Ketch (Bunwinkies / Weeping Bong Band) and musician Robert Thomas (Sunburned Hand of the Man / Dalthom). The duo quickly amassed a body of delicate songs which hover in the twilight of the folk tradition while emanating a peculiar modernity. Ketch's evocative lyrics have been praised for their uncanny ability to bridge the "prosaic to the phantastical". They recently released their eponymous debut album featuring a host of masterful musical friends & collaborators.

Critical Acclaim:

"Stella Kola’s songs wash over the listener with a beautiful woe. It’s hard to see an album, especially a debut, capturing the heart as hard as this one. This is an essential record." -Raven Sings The Blues

"Pitched somewhere between Vashti Bunyan’s breathy, quavering delicacy and Judee Sill’s conversational but melancholy clarity, Beverly Ketch’s soft sighs weave among aching strings and chiming guitars, and her gentle ruminations on the sparse space shanty “Rosa” haunt my dreams."-Chicago Reader

CEREMONIAL ABYSS is a Northwest-based ambient/tape collage artist. He has toured the US extensively in support of his 2023 self-releases ‘Tape Study for Four Variants’, and ‘23’. CA has performed with artists such as Brenda Iijima, Pete Swanson (Yellow Swans), Lori Goldston, Vi Khi Nao and Will Alexander (2023 Pulitzer Finalist), along the way.