Los Angeles/Brooklyn based vocalist, composer, and recording artist Sondra Sun-Odeon has announced a winter tour in support of her sophomore album Desyre out now via Graveface Records (order). The album features Mary Lattimore, Thor Harris (SWANS), Lia Simone Braswell (A Place to Bury Strangers) and J.R. Bohannon. The upcoming tour will include shows in Washington, D.C., Brooklyn, San Francisco and more. Additional West Coast tour dates will be announced shortly.
Sondra Sun-Odeon is known for her songs of ethereal melancholia and otherworldliness. Desyre picks up the doomy vibe her debut Æetherea left us with, weaving it into a heavy, transcendent soundtrack of personal devastation and insight. The sound is heavier with Thor Harris of SWANS helming drums and percussion, and the band bigger; instead of her usual -- playing layers upon layers of guitar herself -- Sun-Odeon this time invited J.R. Bohannon (Ancient Ocean) to contribute everything from electric hot licks to sublime fingerstyle acoustic, to spectral pedal steel playing; Anthony Piromalli brought additional doom metal and ambient soundscapes.
With this core band, Sun-Odeon recruited Alex DeGroot (Zola Jesus) as engineer and co-producer, and began recording the album winter of 2018 at Seahorse Sound studios in downtown Los Angeles. Highlights of the sessions included Mary Lattimore contributing harp on several tracks and recording the epic, almost nine-minute long "Drowning Man: An Invocation for the Demise of Patriarchy". The track amalgamated Cordey Lopez and Matthew Clough-Hunter on gamelan, Lia Simone Braswell (A Place to Bury Strangers) reciting Sun-Odeon's reimagined 70's feminist manifesto, Bohannon's throat singing, a women's chorus, and excerpts from an improvised half hour-long wall of noise guitar drone that Sun-Odeon, DeGroot, Piromalli, and Bohannon unleashed in studio.
01.16 Washington, DC @ Slash Run
01.18 Round Top, NY @ Glen Falls House
01.20 Brooklyn, NY @ St. Vitus
01.30 San Francisco, CA @ The Knockout
01.31 Eureka, CA @ The Siren's Song Tavern (Benefit Show for Outer Space)
Photo credit: Anna Aguirre
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