Lost in the Trees put out one of my favorite albums of 2010, and the NC band is due to release its new one, A Church That Fits Our Needs, March 20 on Anti-. This is the first video from the record, which finds bandleader Ari Picker working through the carnage of his mother’s 2009 suicide. It’s a tribute, of sorts, and it takes the band’s orchestral folk sound to new heights. As NPR noted when it debuted “Red” this week, there’s a David Lynch feel to the video, and that haunting/beautiful sensation permeates the entire album. Read what Picker had to say about the video after the jump.
Lost in the Trees return to the Wexner Center April 5 with Poor Moon (Christian Wargo and Casey Wescott of Fleet Foxes).
When my mom passed, I gathered up all of her art supplies (sewing machines, paint brushes, fabrics) and put them into my writing space. She had also left behind a lot of tapes of her interviewing other artists about their work, a unfinished documentary of sorts. I used the four-track machine to harvest some of my moms conversations with the artist Clyde Jones (a local wood sculptor), and used them as samples on the record. When I was little, we lived in a large unkempt farm house, and my mother turned one of the bigger rooms into her art gallery. Around Christmastime she would put on a show and sell her work. She would take leaves from our magnolia tree and spray paint them gold as decorations for around the house. She would also cut flowers from our night blooming cereus and float the pedals around in the bath tub and take pictures of them. All these little acts of taking normal things and making them beautiful – that is what really influences me. The golden leaves, the swirling paint brushes, they are all intended to conceptualize an intangible place, the place where art is created, as well as a space for passing souls.
They’ll be at the Wex April 5th!