This magnificent album is one to fall in love with and to treasure.
It contains eleven highly personal and profoundly moving songs of fleeting memories and other ephemera.
With an assured recognition of the quiet power of minimalism, Josephine Foster performs alone in a subdued and controlled manner with just her electric guitar. The album is co-produced with Daniel Blumberg.
Throughout Foster sings in an intimate half whisper in the style of lullabies. She is backed only by field recordings, many from a small la Janda Spanish village which is her home when away from Colorado.
For example, we hear the sound of cats, crickets and an owl on Pendulum which opens with the haunting refrain :“gone is the candle/gone is the fire/gone is the spring of our desire.”
Entr’acte is a one and a half minute track of her whistling with a Tennessee bird.
Birthday Song for the Dead imagines a séance with two mourners singing softly to summon up the soul of a loved one : ”if you would send a sign, maybe we’d be fine. The word ‘maybe’ in this line is particularly heart breaking.
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Reminiscence lasts four minutes but contains just one repeated question: ”Do you remember the time? and a wavering voice from beyond the grave of Foster’s great-grandmother, Filomena Maltese (b. 1893, Napoli) singing ‘Musica Prohibita’.
Although the lyrics to Haunted House are despairing - ”there is nothing on earth that isn’t poison to me” - the ghosts she conjures up are surely benevolent ones. The tune morphs into the wordless Sanctuary recorded in the valley where Foster meditates.
In this way, the magical record closes with her strumming and humming while being serenaded by birdsong.
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