MP3 Monday is a weekly SmartShanghai column, serving up mp3s from bands living and making music in China (or coming to China, or thinking about coming to China, or whatever). Copyright holders: if you would like your song removed, please email us here, and we'll honor your request promptly.

Today's MP3s are in fantastical, phantasmagorical and euphoric anticipation of CocoRosie's concert at Mao Livehouse on August 4. And yes, of course you can order your tickets for this show right here. Funny how that keeps working out for all of us.

CocoRosie are in town after playing at the Zhangbei InMusic festival on August 1. If you don't have the gumption to go to it, well hey you don't have to because CocoRosie are coming to you.



Here's the back story, which sounds conceived by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. It varies according to a few different sources:

CocoRosie is sisters Bianca "Coco" and Sierra "Rosie" Casady. The sisters were born in separate states to hippie-ish parents that became estranged, with the sisters living with their mother. They moved throughout their childhood, spending the majority of their time with their artist and singer mother, and the summers with their father, accompanying him as he took part in vision quests on Native American reservations. The sisters eventually lost contact with one another until they met again some years later in Paris, immediately formed a band, locked themselves up, and recorded their debut record, La maison de mon rêve, in 2004.

A meandering four album later, in music critic terms, the genres CocoRosie get associated with most are "freak folk" and "New Weird America" -- the later is a catch-all term popularized by Arthur magazine to describe a group of artists in the mid ‘00s which combine a bedrock folk aesthetic with psychedelia, electronic experimentation, pop, "ethnic genres" (or "world music"), new age, and even things like opera (in CocoRosie's case). Other acts called "Weird America" are Devendra Banhart and Grizzly Bear, among others, although the emphasis on idiosyncratic and self-conscious experimentation, found sounds, broken genres, social antipathy, conceptual fluidity, and the sense that the sub-conscious has been given creative free reign, means that the sons and daughters and mothers and fathers of Weird America don't particularly sound like each other.

So, really, it's just a flawed approximation useful to denote that this group of people don't really do the same thing as Fear or Dayglo Abortions or something. Here's some MP3s of their newer stuff. "Ethereal" is a bit of a clichéd term, but its pretty apt. Kind of broken ghostly goth sound to these ones.





That first one is off a 2008 single of the same name. The full title of that track and that single -- I just can't fit it on there -- is "God Has a Voice, She Speaks Through Me". The second is off Grey Oceans, which is CocoRosie's latest album (2010) on SubPop records.

According to their self-description, on that that album they're rocking "dreamy soundscape(s) of bass clarinets and drones reminiscent of the film, "The Dark Crystal." That's a nice way to describe it. Freaky fantasy. Jim Henson style, yo.

CocoRosie play Mao Livehouse on August 4. Tickets are 120rmb, available right here!!!!

Photo credits: that first one on the outside of this article is by James Ryang. Middle one is Justin Dylan Renney.

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