Psych-folk singer-songwriter Mariee Siou has released her new EP, Circle of Signs today. Alongside the full collection, Siou shares “Végre Vissza,” which explores the imbalances that exist within humanity and the planet, and channels this layered grief into power. Plus, the prolific singer-songwriter will hit the road this May across the West Coast with support from Kacey Johansing and Angelica Rockne on select dates. All dates can be found below. Tickets are available now.
The highly anticipated 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.
Out today, Végre Vissa (Finally Return roughly in Hungarian) examines the extreme imbalances that exist in within humanity and Earth, and explores what it means to regulate this imbalance. Siou says, “In a society that is so wickedly out of balance with so much emphasis on masculine qualities, it speaks to bringing back in qualities of the feminine.”
Siou continues, “It speaks to some of the horrors I felt after hearing that some locals are hired to set the rainforest on fire in the Amazon. How could we set fire to the lungs of the future generations?” After hearing water could capture grief well, Siou recalls, “I began writing this song after a huge ‘grief purge’ where I cried heavily into a bowl of water. I then poured the ‘charged’ water into a Datura plant I was growing on the deck that summer and the next morning this song began to come as I sat under it doing my morning writing. I truly feel like this song was passed to me from the Datura spirit who helped metabolize the grief and turn it into this expression.”
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 17 – Bolinas, CA – Smiley’s Saloon w/ Jeff Manson
May 18 – Healdsburg, CA – Little Saint
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^
May 28 – Port Angeles, WA – Juan de Fuca Festival
+ Solo set
* w/ Angelica Rockne
^ w/ Kacey Johansing