Ash monoprint paintings available at the SIGE store

Here are some paintings for sale: https://sige.bigcartel.com

Art show on Vashon Island DEC 6 2019

Salt Marsh with Aaron Turner. Come see a whole bunch of our artwork! At Hastings-Cone Gallery on Vashon Island. Opening Dec 6th

Faith Coloccia is a visual artist and musician. 

Her practice is focused on creation myths, both archetypal, historical and personal. She is interested in creation born from nothingness, necessity or proximity, and how the act of reclaiming personal narrative may benefit the communal whole. Her work corresponds to the body, internal functions and in relation to unseen forces. Both chance and coincidence play an important part in her process. In her art as well as in her music, she is actively seeking to collapse time into an eternal present moment, her working process often serving as a ritualized means to celebrate the the force of life.

Coloccia is the founder and director of the musical projects Mamiffer and Mára, as well as a contributor to many others. She is the co-founder of SIGE records based in Vashon, WA where she currently resides. 

Aaron Turner is a visual artist and musician residing in Vashon, WA. Over the past 25 years he has worked at the intersection of music and visual art - searching for ways to connect these worlds through intentional practices, as well as uncovering the underlying parallels that inherently exist between them. The impetus for these explorations has been two-fold: to give form to otherwise unutterable internal emotional currents, and to find means for comprehending identity - that which is inborn, as well as that which is manufactured. Of particular interest to Turner is the reconciliation of dissonant segments of internal/external existence, and how exposition of the shadow self through impulsive creative acts may serve as catalyst to this goal.

  

Turner is most readily recognized for his work as a participant in the musical groups SUMAC, Mamiffer and Old Man Gloom, as well as for founding the Hydra Head Records label, and co-founding SIGE Records with his partner Faith Coloccia.

Mára interview on Concrete Shelves

Interview HERE

Mamiffer at Self Titled Magazine

photo by Ethan DeLorenzo

You can read a track by track analysis of the new Mamiffer album “The Brilliant Tabernacle” at Self Titled Magazine: http://www.self-titledmag.com/mamiffer-feature-the-brilliant-tabernacle/

Here I tell stories about its creation and my strange magic exorcism/pregnancy/birth journey!

“This story is dedicated to the celebration of life. It is the end of a journey. Respecting the nature of what you bring into being. I wanted to create a tabernacle to house the thoughts, memories and meditations of where my son came from, and with it a blessing of protection and love. A wish for him to be in good relation to the world around him. To see the humanity in the human, the consciousness in the plant, the wisdom in the rock and mineral, the knowledge in the animal. I was declaring a gift to him, a promise to nurture his inborn self-love, and to give him a good foundation of presence, that can extend to everyone. Maybe other people need to hear this wish also.”

Love: “On the exhale of my mother, my father. The fire of this love will hold me until I return.”

Mamiffer "The Brilliant Tabernacle" out November 1st!

Photo by Ethan DeLorenzo

Physical copies available HERE
Digital HERE
CD available through DAYMARE Japan HERE
CS available through Ektro Records Finland HERE

Track Listing: 

1. All That is Beautiful 
2. River of Light 
3. So That The Heart May Be Known 
4. Two Hands Together 
5. To Receive  
6. Hymn of Eros 
7. To Be Seen

Vinyl version, 300 copies black/100 colored vinyl copies (re-press 100 Clear), housed in heavyweight "tipon" style jacket, with gold foil embellishment, and oversized LP booklet with art/design by Faith Coloccia. 
Description:

The long-arc vision of Faith Coloccia / Mamiffer has deftly traversed a sonic terrain with an emotional depth and compositional restraint rarely found in contemporary music. Across multiple albums, EPs, and splits, she and her collaborators have tapped into the passionate elements of life—the sublime joys and the harrowing losses - while also providing a score to the less definable moments; the pensive times of solace, the dissonant chapters of uncertainty, and the meditative sojourns. Mamiffer’s latest album, The Brilliant Tabernacle, transmutes darkness and rejoices in the force of life by illuminating the beauty of creation. Beginning with a foundation of piano, organ, and voice, Coloccia enlisted her partner and long-time collaborator Aaron Turner along with a congregation of auxiliary musicians to help her construct “a guiding light” in the form of seven songs.

With The Brilliant Tabernacle, Coloccia has focused her work on encompassing the totality of the human experience. Herein she acknowledges both the joyful abundance and inherent suffering of life, while fostering a deep reverence for “pristine awareness” as accessed by the natural mind. This fecund drive was further bolstered by the birth of her first child after her last album The World Unseen. The attendant experiences with maternity—hope, love, strength, support, surrender, and more than anything, the cognition of the self at its most powerful: the embodiment of vulnerability—prompted the construction of The Brilliant Tabernacle.

The album opens with “All That is Beautiful,” a poetic salve buttressed by Coloccia’s piano, Jon Mueller’s communal drum patterns, Veronica Dye’s constellating flute, and Turner’s dichotomous combination of bucolic acoustic guitar and distorted squall. Amidst this backdrop of lilting major and minor key melodies, Coloccia weaves a private psalm of global stewardship and personal strength—a prime example of her music serving as a talisman in a labyrinthine world. From there the album segues into the aural blessings of “River of Light,” a psychedelic calling of drones, pulses, and melodic fragments, with supplementary vocals by Monika Khot. “So That the Heart May Be Known” is a blissed-out harmonic incantation, an amalgam of old world folk elements and modern minimalist composition colored by Eyvind Kang’s string arrangements. Coloccia’s lyrics once again serve the overall vision of reveling in the beauty of creation by repeating the cyclical mantra “How does it feel? / What do you know? / All love!” Coloccia asserts that her aim with Mamiffer is to create psychedelia without drugs and spirituality without the dogma of religion, and that principle is deftly achieved on “Two Hands Together” where graceful piano foundations channel lyrical parallel’s between the process of birth and the metaphoric rebirth of baptism, invoking a secular sense of wonder and magic towards both human biology and consciousness. 

“Hymn of Eros” is the centerpiece of side 2, a kaleidoscopic inversion of side 1’s homespun musical traditions interwoven with the electro-acoustic emissions of synthesist Alex Barnett and waves of textured bass from Brian Cook. It’s the track that most closely recalls the ominous lurch and protracted abstractions of Mamiffer albums like Hirror Enniffer and Mare Decendrii, although the lyrical intent is perhaps the most pointed of any song on The Brilliant Tabernacle. “So many problems in the world stem from people who do not love themselves, and have lost a fundamental gift that should be everyone’s birth right: to be loved unconditionally and completely. Much of our conditioning has strived to detach humans from one another, to see difference as threatening instead of as a strength, to separate the bond with the mother and the earth, and this is passed down through the generations,” Coloccia says. “I felt this record was a complete psychic and magical observation of the healing power of true love, of respecting vulnerability, of not wanting to forget where we all come from- how we were all once helpless and all deserving of love.” The album closes with “To Be Seen,” a transcendental plainsong that brings the uninitiated into the fold while conjuring the inviting warmth and hallucinatory spirituality of Letzte Tage Letzte Nächte-era Popol Vuh or the hypnotic repetition of Asa Osborne projects like Zomes and Lungfish.

“The album as a whole represents a mythical narrative: the hero's descent into the darkness of the soul and the generational sickness of our current culture and its history, followed by the triumphant reunification with the primal deep of total love. This process generates the power to break the spell of linear time, thought and action, and produces instead a sense of cyclic and physio-psychic existence. It provides the opportunity to overcome indoctrinated amnesia, to uplift collective strength and allows for the restoration of in-born self-love” Coloccia says of The Brilliant Tabernacle. And indeed, the album is a journey through the dark and into luminous revelation, across a myriad of textures and timbres, at turns tranquil, turbulent, and surreal. 

“To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.”- James Baldwin. 

Bio by Brian Cook

Credits:

Written by Faith Coloccia and Mamiffer

Produced by Randall Dunn and Mamiffer

Recorded by Randall Dunn at Studio Litho, Seattle, WA. (2013) and AVAST! Studio, Seattle, WA. (2014, 2015, 2018). 
Additional recording by Mamiffer at The House of Low Culture, Vashon, WA. (2013-2018). Jon Mueller's percussion and Faith Coloccia's piano on "All That is Beautiful" recorded by Matt Bayles at Robert Lange Studios, Lakeshore, WA. (2017). Piano, synthesizer and electronics on "Hymn of Eros" recorded by Nicholas Wilbur at The Unknown Studio, Anacortes, WA. (2016)

Mixed by Randall Dunn at AVAST! Studios Seattle WA 2018 
Strings arranged and performed by Eyvind Kang

Faith Coloccia: vocals, piano, organ, cassette field recordings, auxiliary percussion 
Aaron Turner: electric guitar, acoustic guitar, additional vocals 
Jon Mueller: percussion 
Brian Cook: bass 
Eyvind Kang: viola, violin 
Veronica Dye: flute 
Alex Barnett: electronics and synthesizer on " Hymn of Eros" 
Monika Khot: additional vocals on "River of Light" 

Janne Westerlund: Kantele on "To Be Seen"

INTERVIEWS:

The 405
Self Titled

PRESS/Reviews:

Portico Magazine
The Wire
The Stranger
Prog Magazine
A Closer Listen
the 405
NPR
Aural Aggravation
Circuit Sweet
Meat Mead Metal
Music and Riots
Kultur News
Scene Point Blank
MMH radio
Faith Coloccia: vocals, piano, organ, cassette field recordings, auxiliary percussion 
Aaron Turner: electric guitar, acoustic guitar, additional vocals 
Jon Mueller: percussion 
Brian Cook: bass 
Eyvind Kang: viola, violin 
Veronica Dye: flute 
Alex Barnett: electronics and synthesizer on " Hymn of Eros" 
Monika Khot: additional vocals on "River of Light" 
Janne Westerlund: Kantele on "To Be Seen"

INTERVIEWS:

The 405
Self Titled

PRESS/Reviews:

Portico Magazine
The Wire
The Stranger
Prog Magazine
A Closer Listen
the 405
NPR
Aural Aggravation
Circuit Sweet
Meat Mead Metal
Music and Riots
Kultur News
Scene Point Blank
MMH radio

Mamiffer shows

We will have these 2 shirt designs available at our upcoming Mamiffer shows:

Nov 4 / The Crocodile / Seattle, WA with Mono (Japan) and Bell Witch
Nov 5 / The Imperial / Vancouver, BC with Mono (Japan)
Nov 9 / Modular 8 / Portland OR, with Daniel Menche and Jim Haynes

https://www.thestranger.com/events/41264454/mono-mamiffer?fbclid=IwAR0RBZ_SphtPkWl5pAnaB711KRgnME4BZKkAZxIV49SHhitd5xrL6hX114g

Mamiffer "All That Is Beautiful"

Heres a video for 'All That Is Beautiful" from the new Mamiffer LP "The Brilliant Tabernacle". Video by Lauren Rodriguez. Thank you Randall Dunn, Matt Bayles, Jon Mueller, Veronica Dye, Monika Khot and Lauren.

From Faith: "I worked with Lauren Rodriguez on this video, and gave her my notes and themes which she interpreted into film. She was involved in the process on a heartfelt and emotional level as well as a creative one. She helped me create a visual narrative representing the psychedelia and different mind-states of new parenthood and the feeling of being "earth-bound". 

"Focusing on the matrilineal connection to my mother, grandmothers and great grandmothers. In the video I dress up in their clothes and jewellery,  I wash their blankets and make their beds. I was attempting to follow in the strength of their footsteps- that when seen as domestic- were silenced and made invisible/mundane- and instead elevate them to the full colour of the present. I wanted to find the power of their souls, and carry that through visuals of where I live, and the land that surrounds our home. Two artists that inspired me in the making of this video and song were Audre Lorde's The Erotic As Power and the documentation of the "earth-body" artist: Ana Mendieta."

More info HERE

Pre order HERE

Happy release day! Daniel Menche and Mára

Happy release day to Daniel Menche! "Melting Gravity" is available now! available at:
BANDCAMP
MERCHTABLE
BOOMKAT

Happy release day to Mára (Faith Coloccia)! "Here Behold Your Own" is available now! available at:
BANDCAMP
MERCHTABLE
BOOMKAT

Mamiffer "River of Light"

I'm happy to announce the upcoming release of Mamiffer’s new full length “The Brilliant Tabernacle” - coming Nov 1st from SIGE Records. Here is “River of Light”, the first preview track from the album. Thank you!

Pre-order from: sigerecords.merchtable.com sigerecords.bandcamp.com

Daymare Recordings is releasing the CD version of "The Brilliant Tabernacle". from Daymare Recordings: "new release:
MAMIFFER "The Brilliant Tabernacle" including bonus disc, due out on November 6th
サウンド構築の美しさは言わずもがな、Faith Colocciaのシンガーとしての成長が驚異。Randall Dunnのプロデュース手腕が魔術。最高傑作! 日本盤のみボーナス・ディスク付2枚組仕様。
more soon..."

Mára booking in Europe by Swamp Booking

Mára is now booked by Swamp Booking in the EU. Thank you Giorgio and Swamp Booking.giorgio@swampbooking.com

New Mára record: "Here Behold Your Own" available for Pre-order from SIGE

Mára "Here Behold Your Own"

Side A: A New Young Birth 
Side B: Sangre de Cristo 

Available for pre-order HERE.
Available at SIGE HERE.

Preview a track HERE.

Mára is the solo project of Faith Coloccia, the hermetic composer, songwriter, and vocalist who has a central figure in numerous projects including Mamiffer and her ongoing collaborations with Alex Barnett. Her arrangements for piano, organ, electronics, guitar, and voice often take the form of deconstructed plainsongs, as elegant variations of a melody that smolder and dissolve into heavy-lidded assemblages of shadow, fog, and echo. As Mára, she continues with her signature aesthetics, while laying bare the emotional core of her being. 

Here Behold Your Own follows the very limited Surfacing cassette from 2015. The album began to take shape shortly upon the conception of her son and evolved to encompass her becoming a mother in conjunction with the re-engineering of her creative processes. Coloccia reflects upon the album’s origins, stating “ A lot of the material that I used to make this record felt like the last glimpses of ‘me’ before I became another me. Almost as soon as I conceived I felt the old me slipping away, and so these recordings and photographs were like the last time spent with myself before I changed.”

Mára’s melodies draw from the lullabies that Coloccia would sing to her son. Dating back many years, she has employed the...  more

credits

releases September 13, 2019

Side A: A New Young Birth
Side B: Sangre de Cristo

Recorded and mixed by Faith Coloccia 2018 on Vashon Island WA
Using cassette recordings from 2015-2018
Mastered by Randall Dunn

Mára "Here Behold Your Own"

Coming out in September on SIGE records

Full artwork for Jon Mueller's "Canto" LP

Jon Mueller's "Canto" LP available HERE

(Cover)

(Interior flood print)

(Labels)

Full artwork for "See Through" by Aidan Baker/Faith Coloccia/Jon Mueller

You can get the record in the US HERE
And from Gizeh Records HERE
You can purchase some of the original paintings from the release HERE

(flood print image not used in the final vinyl version)

From Gizeh records:

See Through is a new collaboration between Aidan Baker (Nadja), Faith Coloccia (Mamiffer, Mara, Sige Records) and renowned percussionist Jon Mueller.

The project was brought to life through Baker exploring textural rhythms created by sampling small, sharp and abrupt sounds on the electric guitar and then sequencing them in a drum machine to form the bedrock of the tracks. Mueller then added his particular, signature brand of intricate, hypnotic percussion to the mix and the compositions began to grow and take shape. The pair agreed that the pieces needed a more human touch and Coloccia was invited onboard, contributing processed vocals via looping, tape manipulation and microphone feedback.

The result is an other-worldly record that seamlessly flows from beginning to end, immersing the listener in waves of ambient movements and soporific beats. There is a trance-inducing aspect to this work, deserving to be consumed in one sitting and allowed to manifest itself for the duration. The trio have crafted a piece of work that stands up to the quality and integrity of their combined back catalogues and indeed adds something completely new for fans to discover and devour.

PERSONNEL:
Aidan Baker - Guitar and Fx
Faith Coloccia - Vocals and FX
Jon Mueller - Drums and Percussion

Mixed by Randall Dunn at Figure 8 Studios in NY.
​Artwork and design by Faith Coloccia

PRESS:

"Splices space-rock twinkle to a clanging beat with the comforting (ir)regularity of a distant freight train" The Wire

Artwork for Barnett + Coloccia

Here is the full artwork I made for the Barnett+Coloccia record out now on SIGE records:
(The drawings were made by Alex Barnett paintings by Faith Coloccia)
You can get the record HERE and the digital version HERE

Original salt/ash and ink paintings:

Painting available for sale here: 

https://sige.bigcartel.com/product/painting-by-faith-coloccia-from-vlf

Paintings and LP available

Here: https://sige.bigcartel.com/product/baker-coloccia-mueller-see-through-lp

"See Through" is a record I made with Jon Mueller and Aidan Baker on Gizeh Records (UK)

Mamiffer "Recordings for Lilac lll" (lV)

now available in digital form: "Recordings for Lilac lll (IV). Originally released on cassette through the @the_tapeworm Thanks! https://mamiffer.bandcamp.com/album/recordings-for-lilac-lll-lv