If you’ve heard her records, you could be forgiven for thinking that Josephine Foster’s quavering, sepia-tinted voice is something beamed in from another age. It conjures up images of an older southern woman, sitting on the porch of a clapboard shack in the years before the civil war, absent-mindedly singing ancient folksongs while accompanying herself on a flood-damaged upright piano, as other instruments creak and drone around her.
However, seeing this Colorado-born oddball and her band recreate the remarkable, ghostly music from her latest album, Faithful Fairy Harmony, is an even weirder experience, especially witnessing Foster’s delightful frailties. Her delicate, feathery soprano seems to have an uncontrolled vibrato that sounds as if it’s been recorded on decaying tape. Her acoustic guitar playing is endearingly clunky, and when she strums an autoharp she doesn’t dampen the open strings as she changes chord, creating a weirdly punky dissonant drone that adds to the music’s spectral qualities.
Her lyrics – of faith, benevolence, nature and divine forces – are those of the god-fearing 19th-century matron. Occasionally there are glimpses of the modern world: a naifish song called Challenger alludes to the space shuttle disaster of 1986 in the style of David Bowie’s Space Oddity, but even here Foster addresses the doomed spacecraft like an awestruck Victorian who has never witnessed manned flight before.
Foster’s band help her move backwards and forwards in time: her bassist Rosa Gerhards and viola player Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh complete an olde-worlde country-and-western choir, while drummer Alex Neilson (from Scottish folk-rockers Trembling Bells) adds compelling textures using brushes and mallets, sometimes sounding like the crackles on an old 78rpm record, sometimes like a futuristic free improv drummer. Oddest of all is Foster’s longstanding sidekick Victor Herrero, who plays his acoustic guitar and mandolin using slides, flamenco flourishes and masses of effects pedals, as if beamed in from another century entirely. This is music that plays games with our ideas of time and space: simultaneously 200 years old and several minutes in the future.
