For her austere new solo 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. She 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. Listening to the record is a transcendent experience. It’s an exorcism, one that exorcises you.
Domestic Sphere, produced by Foster and collaborator Daniel Blumberg, 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 door 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.
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. These songs are vigils, melodies sung intently, to be set aflame and sung off with the wind.
Released: April 2023
Cat: FIRELP684
Label: Fire
