Photo Credit: Nicolas Stokes
TITLE TRACK & VIDEO “CIRCLE OF SIGNS” FROM FORTHCOMING EP OUT NOW LISTEN HERE | WATCH HERE
THE HIGHLY ANTICIPATED, SELF-PRODUCED EP CIRCLE OF SIGNS IS DUE OUT APRIL 28 PRE-ORDER THE EP HERE
Psych-folk singer-songwriter MarieeSiou will hit the road this May across the West Coast with support from Kacey Johansing and Angelica Rockne on select dates. See a full list of dates below with more to be announced soon and get tickets here.
[Portland Performance will take place at The Old Church Concert Hall, 1422 Southwest 11th Avenue, 97201, Portland, OR, US. Doors open at 19:00. Tickets are $22.50]
Siou’s forthcoming self-produced, hypnotic EP Circle of Signs is due out April 28 and available for pre-order now.
The highly anticipated EP, Circle of Signs, explores the grief that comes with the current, various political, cultural and environmental disasters. Over four poignant tracks, Siou reckons with living within a system that deepens inequality and accelerates the global climate emergency and through lyrics and song, offers a path toward healing and attempts to maintain hope of a brighter future.
Siou says the collection of songs is, “an expression of and an invitation to the grief and perplexing questions that must necessarily be faced in acknowledgment of our true selves in the face of our current catastrophic, cultural, political and environmental inheritances—grief as the portal into healing, and which is itself a subversive process in an industrial-capitalist-consumerist climate in which to love oneself is itself an act of subversion.”
Through the EP, Siou speaks directly to the dire need in the modern world for us to reconnect with older and more honest ways of relating to ourselves; to our human and nonhuman kin; to the natural environmental cycles which sustain us and our extended Earth-family; and to the cultures, songs and lives that lie at the interface between all of these interwoven realities.
Circle of Signs was recorded in the Sierra Nevada Foothills in the spring of 2022 and was engineered by OzFritz (Tom Waits Mule Variations, Blood Money) and produced by Siou. The recordings on this EP are built around Mariee’s signature acoustic fingerpicking and voice, but with the introduction of soprano saxophone and various winds played by virtuoso PatrickMcGee—creating a windscape: horns and flutes are interlaced with strong percussion, voice and guitars, creating space and cushioning for Mariee’s eco-mystic poetry to weave through and be given lift by.
Since Siou’s official, captivating debut album Face in The Rocks in 2007, the artist has continually captured the attention of several leading tastemakers. BrooklynVegan wrote about the debut, “It’s a delicate, flute-filled psychedelic folk album with finger picked guitar and airy vocals recalling the work of rediscovered ’60s/’70s artists like Vashti Bunyan and Linda Perhacs.” They added about her 2012 effort Grief In Exile, “‘Grief In Exile’ will almost definitely appeal to fans of Mazzy Star and Joanna Newsom (and Marissa Nadler), and it’s as consistently strong as just about anything she’s done prior.”
Mariee Siou was raised on a farm in the Sierra Nevada foothills in the Yuba River watershed in Northern California. Born to a father in a bluegrass band, Siou was always surrounded by music and taught herself to play the guitar at 18 while volunteering at a school for Mapuche children in Patagonia. In 2007, she released her first studio album, Faces in the Rocks, on which she collaborated with Native American flautist GentleThunder and which achieved a dedicated cult following that would propel her career to this day. She began touring Europe, as well as North America, after being invited to open for the psych jam band Bright Black Morning Light on their nationwide tour that year, and later toured with HopeSandoval, MazzyStar in 2013 and extensively toured Europe and the US headlining and has opened for other acclaimed artists such as Joanna Newsom, Buffy Sainte Marie, Frank Black, and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy.
PopMatters lauded about the commanding singer-songwriter, “[Siou is] constantly rising to the challenge of making a holistically moving record.” They continue, “Surface-level descriptions fall especially short with Mariee Siou, whose poetry is as much about performance as it is about music and lyrics. To listen to ‘Grief in Exile’ is to dream a lucid dream.” Similarly, Bandcamp praised her poetic talent, “The power of Siou’s songs stems largely from her poetic know-how—glimmering prose uplifted by Siou’s multi-hued falsetto, and backed by gentle acoustic guitar.”
Grab tickets now here, see a full list of dates below, and stay tuned for additional shows to be announced.
Connect with Mariee Siou on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube and stay tuned for much more to come from the psych-folk musician.
Watch: “Circle of Signs”| Listen
Mariee Siou Live 2023
May 12 – Boulder Creek, CA – Lille Aaeske*
May 13 – Carpinteria, CA – Sweet Mountaintop Farm^
May 14 – Los Angeles, CA – Genghis Cohen with Angelica Rockne
May 19 – Berkeley, CA – Ashkenaz^
May 21 – Nevada City, CA – Miner’s Foundry^
May 24 – Olympia, WA – New Traditions Fair Trade^
May 25 – Seattle, WA – Tractor Tavern^
May 26 – Portland, OR – The Old Church^
*Solo set
^ w/ Kacey Johansing
https://fanlink.to/vegrevissza
Circle of Signs (EP)
Tracklisting
01. Evil Crawls the Line
02. Circle of Signs
03. Snake Hoop
04. Végre Vissza
Name Change – (“Sioux” to “Siou”)
Mariee was given the middle name Sioux by her parents (as in “Marie Sue”). This spelling most commonly refers to the French exonym for distinct groups of Indigenous American peoples speaking three major language groupings—Dakota, Nakota and Lakota—who formed the Oceti Sakowin Alliance, and this is further complicated by the diversity within these three groupings. Furthermore, Sioux was derived from an Ojibwe term meaning “enemy,” as in “little snakes” or “snakes in the grass.”
Beyond the potentially problematic nature of the word itself, things are further confused in that Mariee is of mixed indigenous ancestry, and considers herself an activist for indigenous visibility and healing—most notably in her home territory of Nevada City, CA, working to increase visibility and hopefully restore Federal recognition for the Nisenan people. Some people assume she comes from Lakota, Dakota or Nakota peoples, and is perhaps reclaiming the word as originally a colonizer’s term.
The bottom line is that it is no one’s business to use the word Sioux (or define whether it is appropriate or not) except, if they so wish, people belonging to the groups who have been labeled as such. She has decided to drop the silent “x” and use the spelling “Mariee Siou” from now on, but this is still a work in progress—some places (e.g. Spotify) involve a more complex process to change one’s name.
For more information on Mariee Siou, please visit:
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