The Bowery Presents

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Twin Sister
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Zola Jesus
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Zola Jesus is the endeavor of a solitary girl named Nika to simultaneously combat and invoke the approaching apocalypse using the only weapon/offering she has: her voice. After a decade of opera study and a musical awakening involving such varied inspirations as Billboard bubblegum, classical aria's, no-wave, and noise, she was able to thread her influences into a sound uniquely her own. Her passionate, soulful melodies are carried by cold waves of haunted dissonance that conjure the tenuous relationship between emptiness and life in each of us. It is this willingness to embrace seemingly disparate styles and philosophies that infuses each song with an electric soul and howling fervor. Zola Jesus is the whisper and wail of impending doom finally rendered audible in all its conflicting intimacy.
Tune Yards
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In and around 2007 Merrill creates tUnE-YaRdS. She thinks the exasperating capitalization will buy her some time.

“Merrill! Can you hear the songs?
“Listen! as though listening were humanity’s life-buoy.
“Recycle! as a noble form of thievery.
“Do-it-yourself! because it makes you feel good.
“Mutate!”

tune-yards came from parents who sewed their lives together with music, and at age seven she proceeded to hum her way through days. She hummed her way through the family record collection: old timey fiddling, Revolver, Django. She hummed her way through mid-‘80’s pop radio and an obsession with Christmas music. She hummed her way through folk music camp, through Smith College and a theater degree, through anarchist puppet training, through brazen, all-women a cappella singing, through heat rash in Kenya, through deeply scrutinized puppet performances in Europe, through her lonely, swirling 20’s. The hum slowly became a yell.

In 2008 she released BiRd-BrAiNs, which she had recorded over a span of 2.5 years on a hand-held voice recorder. Sampling snippets of her life as a nanny on Martha’s Vineyard and later as a young musician in noisy urban settings, she weaved sounds together to make substantial rhythms and then layered her ukulele and vocals over top. The album came out on recycled cassette tape to the chagrin of many, but was also offered by donation as an online digital download.

tUnE-YaRdS toured with Thao with the Get Down Stay Down in the summer of ’08, and then with Disposable Thumbs on a self-booked cross-country tour for two long months in the fall of that year. One result was the release of BiRd-BrAiNs on vinyl through Marriage Records in Portland, Oregon.

Pitchfork even reviewed her album and mistook her ukulele for a guitar (which made the ukulele blush with pride.) tUnE-YaRdS was featured on Said the Gramophone as the #5 Best Song of 2008. The live performance was rated Best of 2008 by Portia Sabin at Kill Rock Stars. She opened for Beirut in February of 2009, and has been featured on Stereogum and other blogs.
Xiu Xiu
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This will be a famous album. To hear it is to remember music‘s native purpose, a howl against the gloom.

Xiu Xiu has long been known among the music bloggers as prolific, bordering on crazed, but with this new 14-song album, each song so different from the next and so fully realized, their creative ferocity is simply astonishing and rapidly taking on new dimensions.

With a heart too sensitive to accept humanity‘s darker side yet also unable to flinch from it, Xiu Xiu is a way of "owning your own shadow." Jamie Stewart has a novelist‘s eye for juicy details, and a poet‘s ability to wring impossible emotions out of the English language, finding black humor where there is usually horror, finding horror where there is usually apathy. And Stewart‘s history-spanning visions of birth and death have never come across more clearly.

The performances, led by Stewart‘s one-of-a-kind voice, are intense, virtuosic and painted in a spectrum of acoustic and electronic colors that one would be hard pressed to find equaled on any album. Many of the songs feature what is now officially the live line-up of the group, with Stewart and Caralee McElroy joined by Ches Smith on drums and Devin Hoff on bass. Women As Lovers marries the ancient with the futuristic, each in all their beauty and terror. Traditional gongs collide with a rat‘s nest of computerized layering.

Many a commentator feared that the "democratization" of recording technology would result in a profusion of mediocre music with substan- dard production values, and while this is largely true, they failed to see another more exciting outcome. The ability to create music at home with no clock ticking has allowed for a new level of care that would put to shame the production tour de forces of another era. In the past couple of years a new sound in popular music is being created, and new masters of this unforeseen style are emerging. And Xiu Xiu is fast becoming the standard against which any claims of meticulousness must be judged.

Make no mistake. No other Xiu Xiu album has ever been more approachable or communicative on a basic human level. What people sometimes fail to recognize is that Stewart is writing about all of us, not a freak writing about freakish things. He voices what the rest of us have a hard time voicing and the feelings in the music are ones that we can all relate to.
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