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Josephine Foster review – endearingly odd musician casts a spell

St Luke’s, London
With a dissonant soprano and lyrics about benevolence and old-time faith, Foster expertly weaves ancient and modern

If you’ve heard her records, you could be forgiven for thinking that Josephine Foster’s quavering, sepia-tinted voice is something beamed in from another age. It conjures up images of an older southern woman, sitting on the porch of a clapboard shack in the years before the civil war, absent-mindedly singing ancient folksongs while accompanying herself on a flood-damaged upright piano, as other instruments creak and drone around her.

However, seeing this Colorado-born oddball and her band recreate the remarkable, ghostly music from her latest album, Faithful Fairy Harmony, is an even weirder experience, especially witnessing Foster’s delightful frailties. Her delicate, feathery soprano seems to have an uncontrolled vibrato that sounds as if it’s been recorded on decaying tape. Her acoustic guitar playing is endearingly clunky, and when she strums an autoharp she doesn’t dampen the open strings as she changes chord, creating a weirdly punky dissonant drone that adds to the music’s spectral qualities.

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from Culture | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2vpiS1y

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