Mariee Sioux

Mariee Sioux grew up in Nevada City, California, a historically creative community in which artists have flourished over the ages. There she wrote verses since she was a young child. Her roots had been planted deep in music through the love of her mandolin-playing father Gary Sobonya, but it was not until Mariee ventured a life-changing trip to Patagonia at the age of 17 that she began to play guitar herself. In 2006 she debuted her first self-released album 'A Bundled Bundle of Bundles'. Early 2008, she released her first studio album 'Faces in the Rocks', filled with references to nature and the Native American people and featuring Grammy-nominee Gentle Thunder. Over 11000 copies have been sold so far. She has drawn comparisons from Joanna Newsom to Vashti Bunyan or Kate Wolf, and has toured through North America and Europe, sometimes alongside fellow folk singer Alela Diane or her friends from Brightblack Morning Light.
While touring a lot (approx. 120 gigs in 2008-2010, mostly in Europe) she released a cover version of The Cure's 'Lovesong', on the Manimal Vinyl tribute record to The Cure, entitled 'Perfect As Cats' as well as a tribute to Graham Nash ('Be Yourself' on Grass Roots Records/Cooperative Music) and worked on her new album, 'Gift for the End'. This last album draws its benevolent psychedelia on the native folk roots: a canyon crisscrossed by paths leading Joni Mitchell’s, Neil Young’s and Bonnie Prince Billy’s souls into a deep world music, mystical and ancestral, either from America or from elsewhere.
It was recorded between April 2010 and August 2011 in Placerville’s Moonsoon Studios and in Alela Diane's father Tom Menig’s Sun Dial studios. Mariee Sioux added intricate melodies to her traditional guitar picking, combining the most classical and the less conventional instruments, allowing herself a wider personal and emotional exploration. As compared to Faces in the Rocks’s consistency and uniformity, 'Gift for the End' offers a large variety of sounds, universes and themes, the one about native Americans, as symbolized by traditional flutes, being more discreet.
The guest musicians are familiar and necessary, Sean Kae’s arrangements and production sometimes treat the traditional folk instruments in a hallucinogenic way: a subtle carpet of percussions, vocal harmonies, ghostly sounds features allowing to link the tracks together and to weld them into a single block of different crystals electric americana riffs ("Tule"), delicate strokes of Wurlitzer ("Icarus Eye"), classical piano tracks ("Old Magic"), new age analogic landscapes ("White Fanged Foreverness"), country western atmosphere ("Twin Song"), or English psyche folk ("Homeopathic", "Ghost in my Heart").
Lately, Mariee Sioux recorded 4 tracks in duo with Will Oldham (Bonnie Prince Billy) to be out on Valentine's Day 2012...