HEATHER LEIGH

Booking: elisa(@)folkwisdom.net

Heather Leigh is a musician and songwriter who furthers the vast unexplored reaches of pedal steel guitar and vocals. Impossible to pigeonhole, her playing is as physical as it is phantom, combining spontaneous compositions with psychedelic folk and industrial-strength progressive rock. With a rare combination of sensitivity and strength, Leigh’s steel mainlines sanctified slide guitar and deforms it using hypnotic tone-implosions, juggling walls of bleeding amp tone with choral vocal constructs and wrenching single note ascensions. Known for her captivating live performances, Leigh’s songs come into vivid life on stage.

Her most recent releases are 2015’s I Abused Animal (Ideologic Organ, the label curated by Stephen O’Malley),Throne (Editions Mego, 2018) and the critically acclaimed Glory Days (Boomkat Editions, 2020) described as “one of the most intangible yet open-hearted pop records of the year”

In addition to her work as a solo artist, Heather Leigh has worked extensively with a long list of unique collaborators, most recently with saxophonist Peter Brötzmann. The duo has released five highly idiosyncratic albums in the past five years: Ears Are Filled With WonderSex TapeCrowmoon, Sparrow Nights and South Moon Under. Heather Leigh’s albums have been met with widespread critical acclaim and coverage in The Wire Magazine, The Guardian, The New York Times, Pitchfork and many more. Heather Leigh is currently working on her next solo album to be released in 2022.

“She seems to be inventing new song forms, or perhaps it’s just that she’s unconcerned about loyalty to any song form. Some tracks are for vocals alone, and sound like hymns or prayers, careful and confidential but given errant details that sound improvised.” THE NEW YORK TIMES

“All notions of the pedal steel’s laid-back, country harmony are shattered as Leigh extols jagged notes and blocks of electric noise that seem to rail against rock, jazz and other notions of freedom music.” DUSTED MAGAZINE

“Wintry, ethereal and strangely bewitching, it feels both ancient and modern, rooted in the raw Appalachian landscape of Leigh’s childhood and the contemporary language of a confessional memoir. With each successive track, Leigh’s words become more visionary, dreamlike, raised high by exploratory pedal steel playing with moves from oscillating warmth to ecstatic noise…always with perspectives distorted, forms mutated, an altered state of consciousness that, like all the best psychedelic trips, ultimately escapes definition.” MOJO MAGAZINE

“Like a Nico without drugs that has withdrawn to private life in a remote campaign of the Faroe Islands” THE NEW NOISE

“…pedal-steel alchemist has cast a long shadow across the international underground…on ‘I Abused Animal’, Leigh works with stretched song forms – the result is remarkable, with tintinnabulating tones caught in sensual caress with her fiercely private vocals, her troubled, dream-warped lyrics sometimes dissembling into stray syllables and clotted sighs. By the closing “Fairfield Fantasy”, the memory work Leigh’s undertaking is emotionally eviscerating.” UNCUT MAGAZINE

“She is summoning the spirits of the ghost-women of rock ’n’ roll past who were perceived as the sponges of the love-cloaked-violence and guitar-death-gazes of the almighty rocker.” TINY MIX TAPES

“Leigh’s sheer confidence, focus, and laser-like direction turn what in lesser hands might be a set of intriguing experiments into a defining, all-encompassing statement.” THE OUT DOOR/PITCHFORK

Photo by Peter Gannushkin