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Tiny Vipers, aka Jesy Fortino, a musician living in Seattle, is bringing her sparse and haunting songs to Australia for the first time. Tiny Vipers has just released Life on Earth, her second album on Sub Pop/Stomp. Tiny Vipers' complex yet minimal sound of her bouyantly deep voice, accompanied by sparse yet deft acoustic guitar, offers mysterious windows into a fragile human soul with a beautiful and hollow vision of experiences beyond. Fortino simultaneously conveys the sadness of trauma and a tremendous natural beauty of untamed wilderness of the human heart and soul.
Transcending the mere folk tag (“She’s not telling stories; she’s after incantation and trance”- New York Times), Tiny Vipers leaves behind her contemporaries. Often compared to Joanna Newsom, Cat Power, the music has been deconstructed into an aether that floats beside the poignant lyrics. Drawing from disparate inspirational sources, from the avant-garde or from country musician Townes Van Zandt, Tiny Vipers' playing is no imitation. Fortino stands on her own, giving a musical life to those themes that inhabit her lyricisms: love found and lost, places come and gone. The persona of this album stands like a mountain watching the world go by, changing so fast. The future annihilates the past, consuming it like a fire.
Since her last and first album, 2007’s Hands Across the Void, Tiny Vipers has been back and forth across Europe, on tours into and through the United States, transfixing audiences into a solemn hush. For those of us not yet lucky enough to see her live, Tiny Vipers' captivating performance on the Burn to Shine 5: Seattle DVD has allowed a glimpse of what to expect from a show. Fortino braves a world at times not ready to contemplate its own doing, she brings honesty to her live performances.
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