CocoRosie to release 'Grey Oceans' + May 2010 UK tour dates

'Grey Oceans' album released 3rd May 2010 on [PIAS] Recordings and UK tour through May 2010

Grey Oceans is the fourth album by CocoRosie, the celebrated duo comprising US-born, Paris-based sisters Sierra and Bianca Casady and named for their childhood nicknames.

It offers a glimpse into the sisters' intricately spun, thoroughly imagined world, their music incorporating elements from opera, electronica, and folk; tied together with fairytale lyrics.

The unique voices belong to both girls, Sierra's harp is ever-present and Bianca plays percussion and children's toys.

The album's story begins in Paris, where new band member Gael Rakotondrabe, a jazz pianist, became an invaluable collaborator. The first session lasted for five days and five nights of intense inspiration and analogue experimentation. "Everything at that point was based on improvisation," say the sisters. "The first song we recorded was God Has A Voice, She Speaks Through Me, a dance song about suicide, spiritual ecstasy and life under the veil."

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Breaking to go on tour, recording continued at the end of the road: Buenos Aires. By sheer luck, the girls found both an analogue studio and Nicolas Kalwill, "the engineer all artists dream of - very talented and always willing to patiently work with the total creative chaos in which our songwriting thrives."

Having been so successful in Buenos Aires, they decided to try their luck around the world, finding studios wherever the final date of their tour happened to be, whether Paris, Berlin, New York or Melbourne. But despite their travels, it was at home where they wrote one of the album's key songs, Undertaker, which samples a tape of their mother singing in Cherokee that they found in a box of her things.

And eventually, the process of wide-eyed discovery came to a natural conclusion. "After a year and a half of fairy toil, a couple of these new songs started to push their way into our live shows," say the sisters. "We knew then that they were ripe and ready to be heard."

Born to part Cherokee mother and American father, Sierra and Bianca spent their childhood living in two different worlds - their everyday life with their mother, a Steiner schoolteacher, and the summers spent with their father, a Shaman who lived on the road. They became estranged as adolescents when Sierra was sent to boarding school, and a "deep antipathy" developed between them.

Almost a decade passed, and Sierra was studying to become an opera singer in Paris. Out of the blue, Bianca - then 19 and living in NYC as a creative writing teacher, designer and model - arrived at Sierra's flat in the French capital, a moment that the elder sister says was "like in Wizard of Oz when it all goes from black and white to Technicolor."

They soon found out they had more in common than they had thought: art, writing, storytelling and music.

The sisters released their debut album, La Maison de Mon Reve, in 2004 on Touch and Go Records, followed it with Noah's Ark (which featured a collaboration with Antony Hegarty) in 2005 and then The Adventures Of Ghosthorse And Stillborn in 2007, with an otherworldly album cover by renowned French artists Pierre et Gilles.

Highly in demand on the live circuit, CocoRosie's live shows have included everything from a trapeze artist to special costumes and a one-off collaboration with the Royal Dutch Orchestra at Amsterdam's Concertegebouw.

Outside of the band, Bianca is an accomplished artist and costume designer, with recent shows in New York, Groningen, Milan and Brussels. In Brussels, she exhibited in 2008's It's Not Only Rock 'n' Roll, Baby alongside work by Brian Eno, Patti Smith, Yoko Ono, Antony, and David Byrne, a noted fan who invited the sisters to perform at New York's Carnegie Hall.

CocoRosie will be hitting the UK May 2010.

May 2010 UK tour dates:

(Dates and information subject to change.)

May 4th - LONDON Union Chapel
May 6th - BRISTOL Trinity Arts Centre
May 7th - MANCHESTER Cathedral
May 8th - BEXHILL ON SEA De La Warr Pavilion
May 9th - ATP
May 10th - LEEDS Cockpit
May 11th - DUBLIN The Button Factory
May 13th - NORFOLK Norwich Festival
May 14th - OXFORD The Regal

'Grey Oceans' Tracklisting:

1 trinity's crying
2 smokey taboo
3 hopscotch
4 undertaker
5 grey oceans
6 r.i.p. burn face
7 the moon asked the crow
8 lemonade
9 gallows
10 fairy paradise
11 here i come

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