Laura Gibson's La Grande

I got into Laura Gibson through her collaboration with Ethan Rose, but her straight folk pop stuff is pretty good, too. Reviewed today at BLurt.

Laura Gibson
La Grande
(Barsuk)


Laura Gibson has a voice that flutters and trembles, hopping octave-length intervals weightlessly like a bird jumping from a low branch to a higher one. There's cranked Victrola aura of old-time-i-ness around her vocals, sometimes accentuated with static, which makes her sound like an old radio transmission, crossing not just space but time. And, yet, though there's much of the past in these pretty, warmly arranged introspections, there's also a strong thread of determination. Gibson wants to know that she is the lion, not the lamb, the crow and not the swallow. As lovely, as delicate, as seemingly vulnerable to the slightest breeze as she is, Gibson has reservoirs of strength and clarity.

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"La Grande"

Bridge Carols

A really beautiful collaboration between electronic collagist Ethan Rose and Portland songwriter Laura Gibson. It’s called Bridge Carols and it’s out tomorrow on Holocene Records.

Here’s a bit from my Dusted review.

Ethan Rose has made a career – and some very beautiful music – out of manipulating old-time sounds electronically. Player pianos, carillions, music boxes have all provided the fodder for his dream-like collages. He chooses sounds that are layered with history, seeped in associations, so that even muted, stretched or sculpted via computer, they carry an emotional charge, glinting like memories in the drone and chatter of consciousness. Now with Portland, Ore., folksinger Laura Gibson, Rose has turned to the most evocative sound of all, the female voice, as the keynote for a new series of dream-like meditations.

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“Sun”