Escaping April, Trying to Catch May

Josephine Foster, the Choir Invisible

After a lively weekend in Oslo for this year’s edition of the adventurous Only Connect Festival I’ve come up shorter than I’d hoped with this week’s newsletter. No matter how hard I try I can only listen to music in real-time, and I value it too much to diminish it with thumbnail descriptions. I’m not traveling again for a while, so Nowhere Street will be back at full strength next week. Thanks for reading.

The Incredible Josephine Foster Ushers in a New Kiezsalon season

I still have vivid memories of how immediately the voice of Josephine Foster captivated me the first time I heard it 21 years ago, via the four-song debut of Chicago’s short-lived Children’s Hour. At the time the unfortunately named freak-folk scene was ascendant, but apart from Spires That in the Sunset Rise, which had formed in downstate Decatur around the same time, there wasn’t too much of that stuff emanating from the city. The Children's Hour hewed closer to indie rock than weirdo folk, but it was Foster’s voice—evoking the mannered purity of British singers like Shirley Collins and Anne Briggs—that instantly stood out, transcending the nominally conventional tunes she and Andy Bar were creating. The group was signed to the indie pop label Minty Fresh, which pushed them within alt-rock circles. In fact, the group’s first exposure arrived through an opening slot on a tour by Zwan, the forgettable rock band Billy Corgan formed after the dissolution of his execrable Smashing Pumpkins. The lineup inexplicably included Slint co-founder David Pajo as a member and he became one of Children’s Hours biggest advocates.

Josephine Foster (photo: Nereis Ferrer)

Within a few years Foster’s ambitions led her to embark on a wide-ranging solo career that continues to impress me. But earlier this year a shelved second album by the Children’s Hour, with Bar and Foster joined by Pajo on drums and bass, was finally released by the Drag City subsidiary Sea Note. Going Home doesn’t reach the heights Foster subsequently achieved, but its stripped-down production eschews the sheen that marred the group’s debut album SOS JFK. Its eight songs are delicately melodic, with Foster’s crystalline electric guitar lines complementing the sophisticated lyricism articulated by her voice, proffering a sui generis hybrid of folk, opera, and pop aesthetics. Revisiting the group’s work reinforces its strange pleasures and underlines the fact that they deserved greater interest. The release might seem like a curiosity, but apart from the song “Dance With Me,” where Bar proves he had no business dueting with Foster, the album sounds fresh two decades after it was made. Below you can check out the breezy “Bright Lights.”

Of course, Foster was just getting started, and the wildly diverse array of work she’s produced since then is astonishing. I’m embarrassed to admit that her prolificacy meant that I sort of tuned out for quite a while, but since she dropped the album Godmother (Fire) I’ve been making up for those lost years. It’s an utterly absorbing collection of indelible tunes bathed in her own inventive synthesizer arrangements, recorded by Cooper Crane (Bitchin Bajas) and released in 2022. In 2023 she released the equally striking Domestic Sphere, which is decidedly more experimental thanks to the production by the singer and Daniel Blumberg, underlining a career devoted to instinctual shifts. While Foster’s theremin-like warble is always instantly recognizable, the context in which it’s placed has rarely remained fixed. In April of 2023 I was in Chicago for the 10^th anniversary of Constellation, and Foster—masterfully aided by instrumental support from Taralie Peterson of Spires and guitarist Bill MacKay—delivered an utterly mind-blowing performance that seemed to channel every radical stylistic shift she’s ever undertaken with blithe grace. Ultimately, the performance made me realize that Foster is a deep artist, a singer and songwriter that can’t be bothered with the constrictions of the music industry. She makes new records that carve out unusual sound worlds, embrace different methods, and feature changing casts of collaborators, but she can’t be hemmed into any single situation as a performer.

Foster is part of the stellar lineup of the season opener for the 2024 Kiezsalon series on Friday, May 3 at Zionskirche, sharing the bill with Ka Baird (another founding member of Spires) and Polish singer Antonina Nowacka. I wrote to her to see what she had planned, and her response indicated how she designs shows according to a variety of factors: which collaborators might be available, what instruments she has access to, and where the performance is taking place. On this current visit she’s not able to satisfactorily present the music from either Godmother or Domestic Sphere by herself, so the show will likely feature music from several earlier albums: No Harm Done (2020), Faithful Fairy Harmony (2018), and I’m a Dreamer (2013). Foster is also a multi-instrumentalist, playing guitar, piano, and autoharp, among others, and for the current tour she’s traveling without anything, so the performance will be shaped by whatever she has access to. There’s no reason to doubt that she’ll pull it off. Her ability to adapt to the situation, armed with such a vast songbook, is amazing, instilling the idea that her art might be impacted by contingencies, but will rarely suffer due to them. She’s also an unlikely magnetic presence, with a manner as unique as her voice. It’s hard to pick just one track to share, as it would take at least a dozen songs to hint at her range, but below you can hear “Lord of Love” from Faithful Fairy Harmony.

The two above-mentioned artists sharing this bill are also totally one-of-a-kind. Nowacka has been quiet on the recorded front since dropping a gorgeous collaboration with ambient musician Sofie Birch in 2022 called Languoria (Mondoj), but a solo performance I saw here in Berlin back in March of that same year seared itself into my memory. Her singing skirts any single practice, as she seems to operate like a medium using only her voice to conjure otherworldly environments with a timbre not far removed from Foster’s delivery, yet decidedly abstract and usually wordless. I can’t wait to experience her current soundworld. Below you can hear a lovely piece from the Birch collaboration, “Morning Room I.”

I’m still trying to get my head around what exactly Ka Baird is doing to produce the eerie sounds on their new album Bearings: Soundtracks for the Bardos (RVNG). The recording features a stellar cast of collaborators including John McCowen, gabby fluke-mogul, Henry Fraser, Andrew Bernstein, Joanna Mattrey, Nate Wooley, Chris Williams, and Max Eilbacher, among others, but the elusive sounds seem to stem mostly from Baird’s “mobile microphone” practice. Sound artists often say that their main instrument is a microphone, but that usually means how the device is used or placed to capture a specific sound, but Baird’s method involved flailing a microphone around to create sounds through motion itself. Anyone who’s followed them online has surely seen the way Baird dramatically waves a microphone around, somehow translating the resistance of air against the machine into a specific whooshing, splattery practice. While someone else might deliver a staid, academic performance, Baird goes all out, stomping around the stage and wielding the microphone like a sword, slashing through the air with jagged, abrupt movement. Some recent performance footage I’ve seen included her dancing around like a jacked-up marionette trying to tap dance without taps. The material on the album is funneled through deep production, forging rich and varied collages that combine the live playing of her guests with a slippery array of electronics that are hard to pin down. Below you can check out “Gate V,” but that still won’t convey what Baird does live.

The Hushed Beauty of the Choir Invisible

A few months ago the Choir Invisible—the New York trio comprised of German saxophonist Charlotte Greve, bassist Chris Tordini, and drummer Vinnie Sperrazza—dropped its lovely second album Town of Two Faces (Intakt), a delicate, agile refinement of its whispery post-bop. It’s a collective endeavor in numerous ways: each member contributes compositions to the band, and the group’s attack feels exceptionally balanced. Naturally, a jazz trio is inherently a joint effort, but considering its tune-based modus operandi no participant is ever reduced to a simple role. Tordini obviously sketches out the harmonic framework of each piece, but his presence extends well beyond a muscular low-end. On his composition “Lockwood” he underlines the changes while simultaneously engaging in melodic conversation with his bandmates. As he says in Kevin Le Gendre’s liner note essay, “I believe the real sweet spot of our band is a kind of quiet intensity,” and, indeed, the trio brings its heat with a gentle touch, usually imparting its laser-focus without turning up the volume. On Sperrazza’s ballad “Stones Covers” Tordini spreads his notes far apart, allowing the resonant rumble of the drummer’s tom strikes to occupy much of the space, as Greve unleashes the pretty melody with all of the patience in the world. While the saxophonist might seem like the group’s central focus, her lines often support the activity of her rhythm section, while, as noted above, the drummer’s contributions are textural and melodic as much as they are rhythmic.

The Choir Invisible—Charlotte Greve, Vinnie Sperrazza, Chris Tordini (photo: Desmond White)

In addition to her strengths as an alto saxophonist Greve is also a solid singer, something she devotes greater emphasis toward in her project Wood River, but she does use her voice on the title track, which she wrote. But the surprising voice on Town of Two Faces belongs to guest Fay Victor, who applies her forceful, emotionally potent instrument to a reading of “In Heaven,” a tune by director David Lynch used in Eraserhead and subsequently covered by rock acts like the Pixies, Zola Jesus, and Bauhaus. Victor extends a sound previously finessed by Abbey Lincoln and Betty Carter—thick, lush, and marked by surprising turns of phrase, using it as an instrumental color as much as a narrative element—and her performance is remarkably assured, deftly supported by the trio who deserve credit for including such a dynamic, extroverted excursion in the middle of an album characterized by elegant restraint. The trio is currently on tour in Europe and plays in Berlin on Tuesday. April 30 at A-Trane. Below you can check out the album’s opening track, “Membrane.”

Recommended Shows in Berlin This Week

April 30: Theo Nabicht’s Circle Line Project (Theo Nabicht,contrabass clarinet with Alexandre Babe, drums, percussion, and Joke Lanz, turntables), 8:30 PM, KM28, Karl Marx Straße 28, 12043 Berlin 

April 30: Fie Schouten, clarinets, and Katharina Gross, cello (Rotaru, Hirs, Waller, Poppe, Oh, Tüzün), 8 PM, BKA Theater, Mehringdamm 34, 10961 Berlin

April 30: The Choir Invisible (Charlotte Greve, saxophones, Chris Tordini, double bass, Vinnie Sperrazza, drums), 8:30 PM, Jazz Club A-Trane, Bleibtreustraße 1, 10625 Berlin

May 2: Zea (Arnold de Boer), guitar, voice, and Xavier Charles, clarinet; Axel Dörner, trumpet, and Alexander Markvart, feedback guitar, objects; Zea, Charles, Dorner, and Markvart, 8 PM, Petersburg Art Space, Kaiserin-Augusta-Allee 101, 10553 Berlin, entrance in the courtyard, Aufgang II, 1 OG

May 3: Antonina Nowacka; Josephine Foster; Ka Baird, 8 PM, Zionskirche, Zionskirchplatz, 10119 Berlin

May 4: Felix Henkelhausen Quintet (Felix Henkelhausen, double bass, Wanja Slavin, alto and soprano saxophones, Uli Kempendorff, tenor saxophone and clarinet, Valentin Gerhardus, piano, electronics, Leif Berger, drums), 8:30 PM, Donau115, Donaustraße 115, 12043 Berlin

May 4: Valentina Goncharova; Blue Lake; Zoh Amba, 8 PM, Zionskirche, Zionskirchplatz, 10119 Berlin

May 5: Zea (Arnold de Boer), guitar, voice, and Xavier Charles, clarinet, 8 PM, Jugend[widerstands]museum Galiläakirche, Rigaer Str. 9/10, 10247 Berlin

May 6: Nala Sinephro, 8 PM, X-Jazz Festival 2024, Huxleys Neue Welt, Hasenheide 107, 10967 Berlin

May 6: Adrianne Lenker; Twain, 7:30 PM, Admiralspalast, Friedrichstr. 101
10117 Berlin