Josephine Foster is a Colorado composer and performer whose “music plays games with our ideas of time and space” says The Guardian. The Nashville Scene describes her work a”fusion of art song and American folk music” and the former opera student is “known to breathe new life into archaic forms, embodying the cultural archaeology of Harry Smith’s old weird America, and has lent her characteristic mezzo-soprano and interpretive wit to over two decades of recordings” writes Blank Forms.
You might call Ms. Foster’s eerie warbling old-fashioned, except that it evokes a scrambled past that exists only in her own vision: mountain songs that never were, spaced-out hybrids that never will be. – The New York Times
Josephine has released some twenty albums, each a sui generes song cycle drawn from her own singular songbook, performed solo or leading various ensembles (occasionally under band guises: Mendrugo, the Supposed, Born Heller.) Peripheral but not insignificant are her unorthodox arrangements of 19th century German Lieder, the folkloric collection of Lorca, or her musical settings of Dickinson and other poets. Foster is a poet herself, as well as visual artist.
On stage or in recording she collaborates with free players from folk and avant-garde, such as Michael Hurley, Keiji Heino, Gyða Valtýsdóttir, Sonny Simmons, Paz Lenchantin, The Cherry Blossoms, Victor Herrero, Jason Ajemian, The Master Musicians of Joujouka, Daniel Blumberg, Shahzad Ismaily, Heather Trost, Chris Scruggs, Lorena Alvarez, Moon Bros, Alex Neilson, Ed Askew, Susan Alcorn, Michael Zerang, Lori Goldston, Brian Goodman, Eric Chenaux, Louis Landes Levi, David Pajo, Alasdair Roberts, Victoria Williams, Hamza el Fasiki, Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh, Les Fils du Détroit, Kath Bloom, and Zoh Amba.
A nomadic spirit living between the US and Spain Josephine performs at venues such as Cafe Oto, Zebulon, MoMA PS1, Constellation, Issue Project Room, Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea, Tangier American Legation Museum, Paradiso, Tonic, Arkaoda, Chicago Cultural Center, Les Instants Chavirés, Beirut Art Center, Teatro Fondamenta Nuove, EMPAC, Trans-Pecos, Barbican, Monasterio de Santa Maria de las Cuevas, Troubadour, Andy Warhol Museum, ZDB, Palazzo Biscari, Trinosophes,ODA, Musée national Eugène Delacroix, Brown’s Diner.
Some past festival appearances include Big Ears, Le Guess Who?, London Contemporary Music Festival, Donau, ArthurFest, Liverpool Biennal, ATP, Copenhagen Jazz Festival, Etcetera, KRAAK, Million Tongues, Counterflows, Stockholm New Music Festival, Suoni per il Populi, Incubate, Green Man, Platform, Serralves, Mimi.
On her latest offering Domestic Sphere, Josephine performs solely with her electric guitar and then subverts the usual range of her voice to embody other frequencies and sounds beyond the surface layer of the songs .
Godmother (Fire) and Spellbinder (Takuroku) are two recent solo records that brought front and center for the first time Josephine’s own synth arrangements. Mystery Meet and What is it that ever was? , collections of improvised song experiments released as CD-R’s in 2006, are now available in their first vinyl pressings on Feeding Tube records.