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Mia Doi Todd returns with her 9th album, COSMIC OCEAN SHIP, produced by Jonathan Wilson. Recorded in Los Angeles to analog 2 inch tape, the album has a warmth and depth that showcases Mia's beautiful, powerful, unique, and at times delicate voice.
Inspired by interstellar journeys, reflective encounters with friends, and explorations of forest, beach, jungle, desert, and city in Cuba, Brazil, Mexico, France, and India, Mia searched deep within to communicate a new perspective - one that transports the listener into the ecstatic radiance of intimate Love, and one that is yearning with an overall optimistic vision for the future of Planet Earth and the human experience. In reaction against the political, economic, and environmental upheaval and devastation of the last decade, Mia felt compelled as an artist to take a stand and create something for our time that focuses on beauty, joy, light, and Love:
"Like all my songs, these are very earnest and personal, but I hope they are universal as well and can reach people's hearts and turn them on! Modern life demands a lot of the human mind and body; we become desensitized and hardened. The songs on COSMIC OCEAN SHIP offer a chance for a softening, a heart opening. They are joyful!"
The whole record was tracked in just over 4 days, with Gabe Noel on bass, Andres Renteria on percussion, Adam MacDougall on keys and Jonathan Wilson both engineering and rotating on various instruments. Most of the songs were recorded live with the band all playing together and Mia playing and singing in the same room. Listening to COSMIC OCEAN SHIP, one hears the sweet nuanced relationship between the room, the tubes, the weathered circuitry, and the collective energy in the sessions. There's a real magic captured on tape here.
In addition to the original compositions that make up the majority of COSMIC OCEAN SHIP, Mia covers the classic lament "Gracias a la Vida" written by Chilean Folk artist Violeta Parra in 1966, and "Canto de Iemanjá," the Afro Samba tribute to the great Orisha of the Ocean, by Baden Powell and Vinícius de Moraes.
COSMIC OCEAN SHIP is exactly the kind of music the world needs right now! Honest, vulnerable, imaginative, courageous, and full of color and dimension.
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BIOGRAPHY:
Mia Doi Todd is a prolific singer-songwriter from Los Angeles, California. She began singing as a child in choirs and later studied classical vocal technique. She found her own voice in writing songs about nature, romance, love and loss. Her first solo acoustic album, “The Ewe and the Eye” was released in 1997 as Todd was graduating from Yale University. She then spent a year in Japan, studying the avant-garde dance form Butoh and returned to the States to release two more acoustic albums, “Come Out of Your Mine” (1999) and “Zeroone” (2001). In 2002, she was signed to Columbia Records and recorded “The Golden State,” collaborating with producer Mitchell Froom on more elaborate instrumentation. That was followed up by two albums on the indie label Plug Research, “Manzanita” and an album of remixes, entitled “La Ninja: Amor and Other Dreams of Manzanita.” In 2008, Mia released “Gea” on her own label City Zen Records. It was produced with Carlos Nino and features string and horn arrangements by Miguel Atwood-Ferguson. Mia also released an instrumental album of meditational music, entitled “Morning Music” in 2009.
Mia has toured in the US and Europe, headlining and in support of fellow artists such as Jose Gonzalez, Lou Barlow, Saul Williams, Dungen, The Books, and Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes. In 2009, she toured in Brazil for the first time, performing in Sao Paulo and at the legendary Circo Voador in Rio de Janeiro.
PRESS CLIPPINGS:
Mia Doi Todd's new album, released on Todd's own City Zen Records label, is the latest in a series of near-shockingly intimate and musically intrepid works in which this quietly mysterious heroine of progressive music in L.A. has, with finely plucked acoustic guitar and an alluring voice like cut crystal, brought the tone of private pleasures and pains to resonantly rich new territories. Not altogether the fragile flower she can appear to be at cursory glance, Todd is nevertheless a very finely attuned woman, an artist whose best work has come apparently at the expense of a lot of deeply felt experiences whose catharsis simply must be addressed...Todd's oeuvre has long been that of the delicate, musing thrush, a folksinger with a new kind of folk on her mind, albeit one who explores almost embarrassingly intimate feelings, often in gently avant-garde musical settings. Interestingly, she's long been associated with the DJ/electronic scene in L.A., having collaborated with the likes of Dntel, DJ Nobody and Flying Lotus. LA Weekly
Mia Doi Todd’s quietly beautiful, elegant folk music has always hinged on her mellifluous voice. The classically trained vocalist’s gentle croon and her understated guitar work form the irresistible combination that she’s perfected over more than a decade of recording. NY Press
Mia Doi Todd’s voice is translucent and calming, the portrait of West Coast serenity. If in the ’90s the Californian seemed an aberration—her classically trained pipes unfit for a rock scene that prized rough singers who roared and sulked—by now her mannered folk-rock is commonplace. Even so, Todd stands to the side: Her smooth vocals lack the eccentric cadence of a Devendra Banhart or Joanna Newsom; whereas her contemporaries emulate hippies and freaks, she turns to the pristine likes of Joan Baez. TimeOutNY
With so much young singer-songwriter talent blossoming in Los Angeles, Mia Doi Todd has become somewhat the elder stateswoman of the city’s indie-folk scene. And her sound has matured to make her worthy of that title. Prefixmag
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