Meg Baird + Sharron Kraus + Fursaxa

Event information

We're thrilled to present this triple bill with three great performers of contemporary song and folk music.

MEG BAIRD

There’s a rare intimacy in Meg Baird’s music. She shares secrets, she breaks your heart, she tells you how to fix it. Her second album Seasons On Earth is a beautiful, moody masterpiece of understatement—part wanderer, part flower, part assassin—moving stealthily from light to shadow and back again.

Long-based in Philadelphia, Meg became involved in a vibrant music community forged by outfits such as Siltbreeze Records, Bardo Pond and a network of low-to-the-ground artist collaboratives. In the early years of the last decade—along with Greg Weeks and Brooke Sietinsons – Meg help found the band Espers. The group—one of the most cryptic, inventive and adored bands among an eclectic peer group, released four records to widespread critical acclaim. Meg Baird’s ethereal vocals, guitar arrangements, and songwriting contributions were cornerstones of the Espers’ cooperative sound.

Meg Baird’s influences run deep and wide, and a unique style was revealed in the astonishing 2007 solo debut, Dear Companion. The melancholy and nuanced acoustic LP found Meg compared to folk icons like Sandy Denny and Pentangle’s Jacqui McShee. And in creating a project that nearly played as a love letter to record collectors, she re-interpreted songs by Chris Thompson , Fraser & Debolt and Jimmy Webb among others. The covers were sparse and hauntingly heartfelt, but the album’s original compositions were as strong as any from the 1970s singer-songwriter era. Dear Companion was a complex look at love, betrayal, and isolation. And the work garnered the attention of folk heavyweights and contemporaries alike—she opened for Bert Jansch and Michael Chapman, and contributed to recordings by Will Oldham (Ask Forgiveness, 2007), Sharon Van Etten (Epic, 2010) and Kurt Vile (Smoke Ring for My Halo, 2011).


SHARRON KRAUS

British singer/songwriter Sharron Kraus is very much in the school of subdued yet haunting, at times foreboding progressive British folk music of artists that flourished in the 1960s and 1970s such as Shirley Collins and Bert Jansch. Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, and the Violent Femmes are also mentioned as inspirations on the credits to her first album. But really, Kraus is far more British than any of those artists in her approach with both respects to her material and instrumentation, though she does share a bent for brooding darkness with the likes of Cohen and Waits. The songs on her 2002 debut album, Beautiful Twisted, though all self-penned, are very much in the folk tradition in their emphasis upon ballads of somber romance, abandonment, and isolation. Though the emphasis is on her acoustic guitar, the arrangements also intelligently add fiddle, bass, banjo, and other instruments.

~ Richie Unterberger, Rovi

"Kraus' gorgeously crystalline voice [is] perhaps one of the clearest, sweetest, and most lilting instruments in the current female folk canon." Jeff Penczak, Fake Jazz (Rating: 10 / 12)

FURSAXA

Fursaxa is Tara Burke. Formerly a member of the Siltbreeze band UN, Tara started her fursaxa project in 1999 after un disbanded. Since then fursaxa has released six full length albums on the acid mothers temple label, ecstatic peace, time lag, eclipse, last visible dog, and atp. In addition there have been 3 self released cd-rs and a cd on her own sylph recordings. In addition to recording, Fursaxa has played live music at venues in the US, UK, and EUROPE, touring with Bardo Pond, Black Forest/Black Sea, Christina Carter, Jack Rose, Spires That in the Sunset Rise, and Brightblack Morning Light to name a few. over the last couple of years Fursaxa has been collaborating more and more with other musicians as well. Espers member Helena Espvall and Tara have a duo called Anahita, and Sharron Kraus and Tara have the duo Tau Emerald. In september of 2006 Fursaxa became part of the Valerie Project, which was a live soundtrack for the 1970 czech film Valerie and Her Week of Wonders.