Mariee Sioux with Angelica Rocke and THISTLE
Angelica Rocke will be following with her voice of timeless reckoning and songs that transport you into illuminating realms of now with classic touches of the best parts of the 70’s ♥
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More on Mariee Sioux:
Mariee Sioux has long been a fixture in the California folk scene, revered for her delicate fingerpicking and mystical songs that reflect her Native American heritage. Poetic mysticism and ancestral remembrance have always been deeply embedded in Mariee Sioux’s music. There is a transcendent quality in her unique expression that sometimes feels otherworldly. Her ethereal singing aches with haunting sensitivity, calling forth what is dormant within us and awakening deeply sown seeds of our inner worlds, it often moves listeners to tears. Over the past decade many people have written her to express their of profound healing experiences the music has supported them through; from births, to loved ones last breaths, moments of peace during drug withdrawals and re-connection to the self during trying times or heartbreak. There seems to be a medicinal quality to her music that is undeniable and sought after in an often destructive and disconnected age. Through her music Mariee distills the wisdom of ancestors in a way that chillingly resonates. Her songs seem to connect you instantly with the original innocence and transcendent wisdom that is inherent in each of us.
Coming from mixed races of Polish, Hungarian and Native American heritage she has always been fascinated by her ancestry and is involved in local and national indigenous activism. A highly sensitive person, Mariee was raised in the small gold mining town of Nevada City that resides on occupied Nisenan territory in Northern California. She grew up daydreaming about the old ways of her ancestors and what pre contact life for the Nisenan might have looked likeon their land, imagery that later found it’s way into her songwriting.
There is a maturity and deepening sense of self in the nature of Mariee Sioux’s recent songwriting. Her third album Grief In Exile was recorded over the spring of 2018 with her friends and Co producers Kacey Johansing and Tim Ramsey on the coast of California. It was written over 5 years of deeply profound experiences such as traveling to Standing Rock prayer camp, ancestral visions of prophecy and intense heartbreak. Grief in Exile takes listeners through the sonic tapestry of healing Mariee found in creating this music with the support of NAC ceremony and visionary plant medicines. It shares stories of deeply intimate loss and the urgency to entice the sacred work of Grief back to our lives from the exile American society has placed it in. Each song seems to contain it’s own story on the journey of loving and losing deeply and awakening to ancestral remembrance or self reclamation. The album was engineered by Tim Ramsey and mixed and mastered by sonic wizard Oz Fritz (at Ancient Waves Studios in Nevada City) who has worked on acclaimed albums with Tom Waits among many others.
Mariee Sioux is a unique channeling artist, transmitting medicinal qualities through her music unlike any other at this time. Her first album Faces in the Rocks is considered a cult classic and garnered attention from such artists as Mazzy Star, and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, with whom she has both collaborated and shared the stage with. She has also opened for Joanna Newsom, Frank Black, Buffy St. Marie, Alela Diane, and Brightblack Morning Light.
Thistle Jemison’s hauntingly beautiful songs for harp and voice are the product of her formal education in South Indian, Western classical and Jazz music, combined with her love of literature that grapples with the archetypal. Her self titled project, THISTLE, is based in New York City, and usually involves other folk and orchestral instruments. Her music is meant to be played in old churches and cathedrals, groves of trees, dark velvety clubs, castles, and anywhere there is natural or man-made beauty. THISTLE has been described as mystical and angelic, as well as evocative of death, ghosts, deep female energy and pagan magic. In addition to her own project, Thistle plays in the world renowned cello folk/rock band Rasputina as harpist and back up vocalist.
Thistle took piano lessons from the age of seven and especially enjoyed playing the music of Bach. She also had a penchant for singing and experimenting with noise. Thistle began performing as a vocalist while attending a Quaker boarding school in Pennsylvania called The George School. One of her classmates was the daughter of renowned First Nations artist Pura Fe, lead singer and founder of Ulali. Together they performed a cappella the music of Ulali, in the Tuscaroran and English languages, using nothing but rattles for accompaniment.
Throughout high school, Thistle sang in rock bands. At Hampshire College she began an intensive study of singing, theory and composition in the Jazz, Western classical and South Indian genres. Eventually Thistle moved to Brooklyn, NY with her baby grand piano and sought out Karnatak vocalist Saavithri Ramanand in Queens. Under this five year tutelage, Thistle learned classical Indian songs about Hindu gods and goddesses in the Hindu, Tamil and Sanskrit languages.
She finished her formal musical studies at the New School for Jazz & Contemporary Music in Manhattan, attaining a BFA in Jazz Voice with honors. Shortly before graduating, Thistle took up the electric guitar and eventually the drums, creating a three piece rock band which she named Queen of Sibyls. This music was heavily inspired by the alt rock female groups of the 1990’s (link to album “Dark Horse” in Music tab).
Thistle didn’t take up the harp until adulthood. After a year of studying under Tomoko Sugarawa, a classical harpist and reviver of the ancient Kugo harp, Thistle purchased her own harp and did some work with a few bands as a session harpist/ background vocalist. However, two years into her discovery of the harp, Thistle “quit” music. During a four year hiatus, she created an interior design firm, built an inn in the Catskills and took drum lessons with Sara Landau of The Julie Ruin. All the while, Thistle knew she must return to music, her life’s purpose, but felt both fearful and uninspired. In 2015, when asked to join a band in Brooklyn, she jumped back into music, returning to the stage and to the passion she once had for playing the harp and writing her own music.
Writing and performing music is very much a service to others in the eyes of Thistle, a service that borders on spiritual awakening and recovery.