Psych-folk artist Mariee Siou announces EP 'Circle of Signs' & shares single + video "Snake Hoop"

PSYCH-FOLK SINGER-SONGWRITER MARIEE SIOU ANNOUNCES SELF-PRODUCED EP CIRCLE OF SIGNS DUE OUT APRIL 28 PRE-ORDER THE EP HERE & SHARES SINGLE + VIDEO "SNAKE HOOP" OUT NOW LISTEN HERE | WATCH HERE SEE MARIEE SIOU LIVE THIS MAY ALONG THE WEST COAST WITH ADDITIONAL DATES TO BE ANNOUNCED GET TICKETS HERE

"The power of Siou’s songs stems largely from her poetic know-how—glimmering prose uplifted by Siou’s multi-hued falsetto, and backed by gentle acoustic guitar."

"Mariee Siou blurs the lines between waking and sleeping as smoothly as the twilight, and 'Grief in Exile' engages the senses, the imagination, and the heart in truly transcendental ways."

"Mariee makes delicate, tucked-away folk music that recalls cult '60s/'70s artists like Vashti Bunyan, with dream-like elements that have gained her comparisons to Mazzy Star."

Photo credit: Nicolas Stokes

Today, psych-folk singer-songwriter Mariee Siou announces her self-produced, hypnotic EP Circle of Signs, due out April 28 and available for pre-order now. Alongside the announcement, Siou shares the first taste of the project, "Snake Hoop" out everywhere now with an accompanying stop motion music video. Plus, Mariee Siou has announced a string of dates on the West Coast this May with support from Kacey Johansing on several dates. See a full list of dates below and get tickets here. Mariee Siou was raised on a farm in the Sierra Nevada foothills in the Yuba River watershed in Northern California. Born to a father in a bluegrass band, Siou was always surrounded by music and taught herself to play the guitar at 18 while volunteering at a school for Mapuche children in Patagonia. In 2007, she released her first studio album, Faces in the Rocks, on which she collaborated with Native American flautist Gentle Thunder and which achieved a dedicated cult following that would propel her career to this day. She began touring Europe, as well as North America, after being invited to open for the psych jam band Bright Black Morning Light on their nationwide tour that year, and later toured with Hope Sandoval, Mazzy Star in 2013 and extensively toured Europe and the US headlining and has opened for other acclaimed artists such as Joanna Newsom, Buffy Sainte Marie, Frank Black, and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy. The forthcoming EP, Circle of Signs, explores the grief that comes with the current, various political, cultural and environmental disasters. Over four poignant tracks, Siou reckons with living within a system that deepens inequality and accelerates the global climate emergency and through lyrics and song, offers a path toward healing and attempts to maintain hope of a brighter future. Siou says the collection of songs is, "an expression of and an invitation to the grief and perplexing questions that must necessarily be faced in acknowledgment of our true selves in the face of our current catastrophic, cultural, political and environmental inheritances—grief as the portal into healing, and which is itself a subversive process in an industrial-capitalist-consumerist climate in which to love oneself is itself an act of subversion."  Through the EP, Siou speaks directly to the dire need in the modern world for us to reconnect with older and more honest ways of relating to ourselves; to our human and nonhuman kin; to the natural environmental cycles which sustain us and our extended Earth-family; and to the cultures, songs and lives that lie at the interface between all of these interwoven realities. Circle of Signs was recorded in the Sierra Nevada Foothills in the spring of 2022 and was engineered by Oz Fritz (Tom Waits Mule Variations, Blood Money) and produced by Siou. The recordings on this EP are built around Mariee’s signature acoustic fingerpicking and voice, but with the introduction of soprano saxophone and various winds played by virtuoso Patrick McGee—creating a windscape: horns and flutes are interlaced with strong percussion, voice and guitars, creating space and cushioning for Mariee’s eco-mystic poetry to weave through and be given lift by. "Snake Hoop," out today, was born out of an ayahuasca ceremony that led the artist to discover more of herself and a new understanding of life and death. During the ceremony, Siou explains, "I experienced walking the scales of the ouroboros and faced my own death. I felt and saw all the energy of creation as endless and eternal cycles and was overcome with a deep reassurance in that knowing. It seemed my spirit was smiling at the beauty and necessity of death for the existence of life, and had aligned with the light of the stars. After the ceremony, I went out into the early dawn, in the forest of the Sierra foothills, and began humming this melody in the breaking of a new day." Delving into the sonic qualities of the track, Siou continues, "The song carries a cyclical, rhythmic sound that almost feels like a chant through a kind of ethereal, mythic-folk-rock, that brings in soft lilting qualities like flutes and tinkling piano played by Patrick Mcgee, that ebb and flow while high harmonies in the chorus dance through the hypnotic melody." Lyrically, the track paints a vivid picture of both the more recent atrocities of racism in America, and its heinous history. Siou explains, "While the lyrics were written while George Floyd protests were raging around the world (“Been acquainted with apparitions in the night, hoods sewn from the gaunt waving stripes”), the track reflects on America’s haunting foundation of racism and slavery, the continued brutality to people of color in America today, and the cycles of violence and destruction also found within creation and thus humankind as well." Watch "Snake Hoop" (Official Music Video) Its accompanying stop-motion video, directed, filmed and edited by Chloe Becky, illustrates the track using handmade clay figures. Throughout the visual are references to mortality, time, death and rebirth using a miniatrure snake made from braided rope. Further explaining the thought and detail behind the video, Becky says “The imagery of the ouroboros or snake eating its tail is an ancient symbol of the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. The somewhat human character represents mortality and greets the snake with embrace and without fear." The director continues, "The bird-like character is in reference to the crow which many cultures believe represents the afterlife, destiny, or transformation. It turns the hour glass and pulls at the string of the mortal being’s fabric, unraveling them until its fibers are spread all around. To me, the song reminds us that death and life are one and the same.“ Since Siou's official, captivating debut album Face in The Rocks in 2007, the artist has continually captured the attention of several leading tastemakers. BrooklynVegan wrote about the debut, "It's a delicate, flute-filled psychedelic folk album with finger picked guitar and airy vocals recalling the work of rediscovered '60s/'70s artists like Vashti Bunyan and Linda Perhacs." They added about her 2012 effort Grief In Exile, "'Grief In Exile' will almost definitely appeal to fans of Mazzy Star and Joanna Newsom (and Marissa Nadler), and it's as consistently strong as just about anything she's done prior." PopMatters lauded about the commanding singer-songwriter, "[Siou is] constantly rising to the challenge of making a holistically moving record." They continue, "Surface-level descriptions fall especially short with Mariee Siou, whose poetry is as much about performance as it is about music and lyrics. To listen to 'Grief in Exile' is to dream a lucid dream." Similarly, Bandcamp praised her poetic talent, "The power of Siou’s songs stems largely from her poetic know-how—glimmering prose uplifted by Siou’s multi-hued falsetto, and backed by gentle acoustic guitar." Now, in 2023, Siou is ready to push boundaries yet again and expand her profound sonic world, building on nearly two decades of her meaningful, momentous artistry. The prolific singer-songwriter will perform live along the West Coast this May, including in Los Angeles, CA, Seattle, WA and in Portland, OR, featuring support from Kacey Johansing on several dates. Grab tickets now here, see a full list of dates below, and stay tuned for additional shows to be announced. Mariee Siou's ethereal "Snake Hoop," and its accompanying video is out everywhere now. Circle of Signs, the forthcoming riveting, self-produced EP by Mariee Siou is due out April 28 is available to pre-order now. See Siou live this May along the East Coast with tickets available now here. Connect with Mariee Siou on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube and stay tuned for much more to come from the psych-folk musician.

Mariee Siou Live 2023 May 12 - Boulder Creek, CA - Lille Aaeske* May 13 - Carpinteria, CA - Sweet Mountaintop Farm^ May 14 - Los Angeles, CA - Ghengis Khan May 19 - Berkeley, CA - Ashkenaz^ May 21 - Nevada City, CA - Miner's Foundry^ May 24 - Olympia, WA - New Traditions Fair Trade^ May 25 - Seattle, WA - Tractor Tavern^ May 26 - Portland, OR - The Old Church^ *Solo set ^ w/ Kacey Johansing  More dates to be announced

Circle of Signs (EP) Tracklisting 01. Evil Crawls the Line 02. Circle of Signs 03. Snake Hoop 04. Végre Vissza

Mariee Siou Bio Mariee Siou was born on the Humboldt coast in Arcata, California. When she was 2 her family moved to the Sierra Nevada foothills in the Yuba River watershed in Northern California, to pursue their dream of farming and living off the land. She was raised on their small farm whose surrounding lands have been occupied by the Nisenan people for millenia before the cultural and environmental decimation that occurred at the hands of expansionist migrants and settlers during the gold rush, and has come to be known as Nevada City (the Nisenan still survive in tragically small numbers and continue to fight for visibility and Federal recognition). Mariee grew up surrounded and deeply touched by music—often going to bluegrass festivals and listening to her father’s bluegrass band—but held no particular personal musical ambitions. However, she taught herself to play the guitar at 18 while volunteering at a school for Mapuche children in Patagonia, Argentina, and wrote her first songs here while taking refuge from the Patagonia winds indoors. She continued finger picking and writing songs and made two home-recorded albums purely at the urging of friends. In 2007 she released her first studio album, Faces in the Rocks, on which she collaborated with Native American flautist Gentle Thunder and which achieved a dedicated cult following that would propel her career to this day. She began touring Europe, as well as North America, after being invited to open for the psych jam band BrightBlack Morning Light on their nationwide tour in 2007 and has continued ever since. Mariee Siou has learned to more consciously embrace her role in the old and new tradition of healer-singers who have always helped hold the human social fabric together. Through music she attempts to fill a cultural void left by severed connections to her mixed Hungarian, and Mestiza heritages and to thereby address the broader cultural voids felt by Americans today. She does this “with hopes of enticing the sacred work of grief back into our lives from the exile American society has placed it in”—and this is evident in her last album Grief in Exile. The songs continue to come to Mariee, and her approach as a singer continues to mature. The flowing melodies and quivering vibrato of her voice, as well as the poetry itself, continue to locate themselves and their work with a more solidly grounded precision as to just what that work is. Her most recent songs most deeply reflect this clarity of vision and acceptance of both her role as an artist and the endless need for that role in this changing world. She brings us back to the child and the grandmother in ourselves, in a time in which it has never been more needed—and she intends to keep it up as long as she has a voice. Name Change - (“Sioux” to “Siou”) Mariee was given the middle name Sioux by her parents (as in “Marie Sue”). This spelling most commonly refers to the French exonym for distinct groups of Indigenous American peoples speaking three major language groupings—Dakota, Nakota and Lakota—who formed the Oceti Sakowin Alliance, and this is further complicated by the diversity within these three groupings. Furthermore, Sioux was derived from an Ojibwe term meaning “enemy,” as in “little snakes” or “snakes in the grass.”  Beyond the potentially problematic nature of the word itself, things are further confused in that Mariee is of mixed indigenous ancestry, and considers herself an activist for indigenous visibility and healing—most notably in her home territory of Nevada City, CA, working to increase visibility and hopefully restore Federal recognition for the Nisenan people. Some people assume she comes from Lakota, Dakota or Nakota peoples, and is perhaps reclaiming the word as originally a colonizer’s term. The bottom line is that it is no one’s business to use the word Sioux (or define whether it is appropriate or not) except, if they so wish, people belonging to the groups who have been labeled as such. She has decided to drop the silent “x” and use the spelling “Mariee Siou” from now on, but this is still a work in progress—some places (e.g. Spotify) involve a more complex process to change one’s name.

Photo credit: Justin Nunnink

For more information on Mariee Siou, please visit: Website | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube | Bandcamp | Soundcloud