Alice and Michi
It was just before 2011, a jazzy feel-time season, Michi (Michi Wiancko / Kono Michi) wrote Alice (Eagle and Talon) a letter urging her to come to New York and collaborate on a musical project. Alice was driving around Los Angeles deep in her annual autumnal malaise. Skimming the message at a stoplight before stopping at her favorite Subway, she read the remainder just before going to bed. Read more
'Strange Bloom'
‘Strange Bloom’ was written, recorded, and mixed over the course of a six-month-long co-habitation in a Brooklyn apartment. It incorporates lush vocals, richly-stacked violins, bizarre forays into electronica, and an arsenal of unexpected instruments: cardboard paper tubes, trash-filled wastebaskets, live trumpets, howling wolves, and setting 065 on the Casio.
Released May 15, 2012 on Kenji Records (US).
Special thanks to Hugh Ash for playing trumpet and flugal horn on tracks 2 & 3. Mastered by Roman Vail at JLM.
Video
Press
French DJ’s call Strange Bloom “a rich, intelligent and innovative album…composed with a special intimacy” and speculate on whether Alice and Michi have “the same pulpy lips” as Lana Del Ray on Radio France’s ‘Chantons Sous La Nuit Par Arthur Dreyfus.’ Read the full transcript in English.
“From the breathily staccato opening of Cairo through the fractured jazz of Fighters to the electro-classicalism of Goldrush, this is chamber pop at its most glorious” – The Scotland Herald
“…a beautifully constructed debut album…” – Popmatters
Lyrics
Cairo
I have been here all this time, saving up my charms watching trees grow high / you can’t see me all at once / I’m shiny like glass and cracking up sidewalks / who will ever know what I have known / who can ever know what I know? / I don’t need an alibi just because I had a different starting line / even when the streets are quiet, my voice is on my sleeve now my jacket’s on fire / I have been here all this time, saving up my charms watching trees grow high / you can’t see me all at once / I’m shiny like glass and cracking up sidewalks / don’t you know oh don’t you know it’s carved in my bones / don’t you know oh don’t you know I call all these streets my home / who will ever know what I have known / who can ever know what I know?
Show more