“I had the privilege and pleasure of getting to help Indigo put these recordings together back in April and throughout 2019. These songs became near and dear to me, and it was beautiful to help build the billowy landscapes within them. Indigo’s writing and voice are ethereal and angelic and guide me through internal canyons and plains. I’m deeply grateful to have been part of this and to have gotten to play and sing along side Indigo, and to have been able to eternalize a very special space and time with her, which I will always cherish.” – Adrianne Lenker
“With these songs and her filament voice, Indigo brings us in to a private place and lights a fire there.” – Feist
“Indigo Sparke balance[s] heavy, reverb-drenched verses with moments of airy and acoustic whispers. This Australian artist tackles themes of vulnerability and femininity with an eye on life through a different lens.” – NPR, All Songs Considered
“Achingly beautiful and heart-wrenching… Feels impossibly intimate and vast at once, like a cherished secret that, once shared, becomes universal truth.”– Gorilla vs Bear
“Gorgeous and gentle… Sparke sings in an ethereal voice of the kind of love that makes you feel safe.” – Consequence of Sound
“If you like the hushed, delicate folk of Adrianne [Lenker]’s own material, you’re probably going to like this song too. Indigo is a natural, and this song hooks you in with little more than her voice and guitar.” -Brooklyn Vegan
“Sadly beautiful, haunting… Deceptively complex on an emotional level.” – Beats Per Minute
“A glowing guitar lullaby.” – Stereogum
Australian artist Indigo Sparke has signed to Sacred Bones and announced a new release date for her debut album, Echo, now due February 19th. To celebrate, she has shared a video for the album’s latest single ‘Everything Everything.’
Of the song, Sparke says “I wrote this song not long after coming back from a magical castle in Italy where a group of us had been making music and soaking in the golden honey days. I met a beautiful human Shahzad Ismaily who had discovered I also write poetry. One night around midnight he called across the castle and asked me to come over and speak some of my poetry over an instrumental track he had recorded. The only thing he asked me to do was to sing a line or so if I felt it. That song was dog bark echo. He invited me back to NYC and I was living in his empty spare room in Brooklyn briefly. I borrowed this little parlour guitar of his and completely fell in love. I just sat in that room for hours and days playing around and just laying next to the guitar looking at the ceiling thinking about life and death and the poetry of it all. How life and death will hold us up to light. How grief ripens inside us all and we all decay and everything changes and flies away. I remember feeling this liberating sense of freedom and melancholic nostalgia. It was so hot and the wind almost blew through from a different dimension or plane. I guess the song came through from that place too. It just came out. I can almost still feel that time on my skin, or in my breath.”
Indigo Sparke brings her deeply personal lived experiences to her music, highlighting the spaces between the polarity of softness and grit. Pulling from her experiences of addiction, of healing, of queerness, of heartbreak, of joy, of connection, of the softness and of the grit alchemizing it all into tenderness through her music, she conjures up a myriad of feelings that is undeniably potent.
Echo, which wasco-produced by Sparke, Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenker andAndrew Sarlo, is available for pre-order now and due February 19th via Sacred Bones.
Indigo was born in the belly of Sydney, Australia straight into the heart of a family with music in their bones. Her parents, a jazz singer and a musician, named her after the Duke Ellington song ‘Mood Indigo,’ and her childhood was spent serenaded by a rich soundtrack of Joni Mitchell and Neil Young. From a young age Indigo felt called to the stage, attending a performing arts high school, and followed it with three years in an acting school, working as an actress before embedding herself and heeding the call to the path of music.
Indigo taught herself to play guitar in her early twenties. Over the next few years, she established herself on the Australian music scene, and released her EPNight Bloom in 2016. Indigo’s career continually bloomed, opening for Big Thief on the Australian dates of their 2017/ 2018 tour, and then was invited to play at South by Southwest 2019. There, NPR‘s Bob Boilen was first taken by Indigo, writing that her lyrics “both cut hard and comfort” and that her performance “balanced heavy, reverb-drenched verses with moments of airy and acoustic whispers.”Sparke began 2020 with a February Tiny Desk Concert at NPR, and had been booked as the opening act for Big Thief‘s sold-out tour of Australia and New Zealand, including a scheduled performance at the Sydney Opera House before Covid-19 saw everything change.
It was in 2019 that Indigo lived and travelled across America, in places like NYC, Minneapolis, Topanga, Taos, in many hotel rooms and amidst the vast stretching landscapes on the never ending highways, channelling her creative energy into the completion of her latest album, echo. echo was recorded between LA, Italy and New York, co-produced by Sparke, Adrianne Lenker (of Big Thief), and Andrew Sarlo (producer of Big Thief, Nick Hakim, Bon Iver, Hand Habits, etc). The record was completed at Figure 8 Studio in New York City, studio of musician Shahzad Ismaily. Phil Weinrobe (producer/engineer for Leonard Cohen, Damien Rice, Adrianne Lenker, Buck Meek, etc) engineered and mixed the album.Of this incredibly deep and intimate record, Indigo says, “When writing and recording the record, I wondered how it would all come together. I felt like I was standing back in the desert, looking up at the blue night sky, wondering how all the stars would connect. I think sometimes it’s the dark matter or void space between them, that holds it all together. This record is an ode to death and decay. And the restlessness I feel to belong to something greater. Adrianne and I talked so much about keeping the record stripped back and simple, that is, we are all just constantly getting stripped back and humbled by life.”
Indigo’s art searches for the vulnerability that comes with a feeling of true safety, a vulnerability that can grant access to a world behind tangible experience. It is clear Indigo has lived and woven her many lives into these songs, telling us, “I feel and have often felt a million different women ramble and reconfigure the corners of my mind and soul. I think in my life, I have ricocheted off so many different walls within myself. It’s an endless search to understand the mysteries of life and love and history. As soon as you think you’ve got it, it’s gone. Sometimes I feel so thin. Sometimes I feel so robust. I think that comes through the music.”
While Indigo’s songs are an oceanic experience of emotion, her poetry is grounded. Like stone markers on the path, her poems are left for the reader as crossroads where something takes over beyond the logical mind. The visual realm has always been a part of Indigo’s writing process; songs and poems come to her as landscapes and human compositions, and her relationship with the camera is as natural as with the guitar. Indigo’s photography is a collaborative emotional practice that builds trust with the subject and helps them witness themselves in their most beautiful state. Photography’s compositional power has also led Indigo to re-imagine her work as an actress. Rather than working solely in front of the camera, she is transitioning into a role as composer and creative director, making projects that she can step into as subject rather than object.
“I feel that death and time hang over me like questions, I have felt the shimmer and the edge for so long now but what I long for are the worlds of safety and safe love. There are so many windows in life to look through and so many ways to heal and express. My photography, poetry and music, were born at a juncture mirroring different parts of me. I see and feel visually, I am obsessed with immortalizing memory.”
Indigo Sparke – Echo
1. Colourblind
2. Undone
3. Bad Dreams
4. Carnival
5. Dog Bark Echo
6. Golden Age
7. Wolf
8. Baby
9. Everything Everything
Indigo Sparke – Echo is out
digitally Friday 19th February
physically Friday 21st May
via Sacred Bones Records
