CocoRosie


CocoRosie is an American musical group formed in 2003 by sisters Sierra Rose "Rosie" and Bianca Leilani "Coco" Casady. The group's music has been described as folktronica, freak folk and "New Weird America", and incorporates elements of pop, blues, opera, electronica, and hip hop. The group has released seven studio albums, La Maison de Mon Rêve, Noah's Ark, The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn, Grey Oceans, Tales of a GrassWidow, Heartache City, and Put the Shine On, and two EPs, Beautiful Boyz and Coconuts, Plenty of Junk Food. They released their sixth album Heartache City on their own record label, Lost Girl Records.
Originally a duo, the group was formed when Bianca, who was living in New York City at the time, made an impromptu visit to Sierra at her Paris apartment, reconnecting with her for the first time in ten years. The sisters began creating music together, singing over instrumentals produced using a combination of traditional instruments and found objects, most notably children's toys. They later expanded to a group and added various backing musicians, including a bassist, keyboardist, beatboxer, and synth player.
CocoRosie has performed and toured in North America, South America, and at many prominent European venues and festivals such as the Olympia, the Grand Rex, the Royal Concertgebouw, Pukkelpop, and Lowlands Festival. In 2009, music magazine Better Propaganda named CocoRosie the 16th most influential artist of the 2000s.

Early life

Sierra Casady was born on June 9, 1980, in Fort Dodge, Iowa, and Bianca Casady on March 27, 1982, in Hilo, Hawaii. Their parents divorced when Sierra was four and Bianca was two and the sisters, who identify as "part Native American", stayed with their late mother, Christina Chalmers, Iowan artist, singer, Steiner/Waldorf teacher, and "healer" of Syrian Orthodox ancestry who "compulsively moved" and "kept throwing away everything the family owned and starting all over again." Chalmers was born in Madison, West Virginia. Chalmers nicknamed Sierra "Rosie" and Bianca "Coco" from which CocoRosie takes its name. Their mother's partner was the New Age spiritual leader Brooke Medicine Eagle, whom Bianca has said "carried in a papoose around sacred Anasazi grounds" as a child. The Casady sisters have said their maternal grandfather, who they have never met, was Cherokee and that their mother believed her nomadic tendencies were because "her Syrian ancestors must have had a lot of Gypsy in them." Bianca has discussed her mother's ethnic background by saying "Nowadays, who would want to be white? But back then, in farm country, anything other than button-nosed blonde didn't fly."
Their childhood has been described as "bizarre" and "nomadic". They moved almost yearly, living in Hawaii, Arizona, California and New Mexico, and frequently changed schools. Because their mother believed they would learn more "in the real world" than in school, neither sister finished high school. The sisters were somewhat estranged from their father, Timothy Casady, an organic farmer, teacher, and spiritualist who came from an Iowa farming family, and who was interested in New Age experiences inspired by Native American religions, neoshamanism, and "the Peyote Church, which involves ingesting the hallucinogenic cactus peyote." The sisters spent some childhood summers with him, where they experienced him "dragging us on vision quests... as a little kid, sometimes it's a nightmare, you're out in the desert, you don't have any food". In 1994, at 14, Sierra was kicked out of the home by Chalmers and went to live with her father in Sedona, where she began attending private boarding school Verde Valley School and lost contact with Bianca. Bianca also attended Verde Valley School.
In a 2004 interview, Bianca described their childhood, stating "we spent our summers hiking from reservation to reservation... I remember being in peyote circles as a kid, sitting in tepees full of smoke... not being able to breathe and trying to sneak air out of the bottom of the tepee... We always felt pretty much like freaks, but we felt good about it. We didn't have any rules or anything. We had total freedom. It was hard to meet people who had the same values as us. We just sort of carry that with us today. We have pow-wows in our apartment, with bottles of cheap beer. It has to manifest itself somehow."

Musical influence

The sisters generally disliked their experiences when they were children, but came to appreciate aspects that would later influence their music. Later, in a 2015 interview with PopMatters discussing their sixth album Heartache City, Bianca stated that she felt she didn't have "certain rights" as child, and that she and Sierra "didn't really have the space to be children." She explained that in their music they "explore... expressing from a child's point of view... because a child sees what's going on around them but doesn't really judge, and tends to reflect back certain ugliness and then they also don't have shame necessarily, or certain social restrictions on the way that they talk." In a 2007 interview, discussing the track lyrics of The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn, Bianca briefly mentioned that as child she "would burn ants and hunt rabbits" with Sierra, and that on the album is "talk about family members and our experiences... It's not about what we have been doing, more major experiences, like moments from our childhood."
In a 2007 interview, Sierra stated that the track "Rainbowarriors" from their third album The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn is "based on personal experiences and the Native American idea of the rainbow trail, but our own interpretation of that," and, in another 2007 interview, said that she and Bianca refer to themselves as "rainbowarriors". The Legend of the Rainbow Warriors is considered New Age pseudo-folklore and the Casady sisters have been criticized for "race-baiting" and "naïve and insensitive appropriation of Native American mythology" due to their use of Native American themes in their works.
The Casady sisters' mother, Christina Chalmers, died in January 2017 during the production of CocoRosie's seventh album, Put the Shine On, eleven days after providing backing vocals for the track "Ruby Red", which is about her life.

Career

2003−2004: Formation and ''La Maison de Mon Rêve''

Sierra has received classical opera training in Rome, Paris, and New York City. At age 17, she moved to Rome to be privately tutored by Rosana Staffi. In 2000, after having lived in New York City for two years while studying at the Manhattan School of Music and the Mannes School of Music, Sierra moved into a "tiny" apartment in the Montmartre district of Paris, France to study at the Conservatoire de Paris, pursuing a career as an opera singer. Casady cheated to gain entrance to the Conservatoire, stating "I pretended I could sight-read when I couldn't." She also studied at the Conservatoire Rachmaninoff in Paris. During this period she had no contact with Bianca, who by 2002 was living in Brooklyn and studying linguistics, sociology, and visual arts. Bianca had been "really involved in the literary community" in New York, claiming she "had a small press, was making books and hosting book clubs and curating shows" in her home. According to a 2007 Clash interview, the sisters had "hardly spoke a word to each other for ten years" at that point, with Bianca saying they "had seen each other a few times, but... abstained from speaking to each other. It was less of children being split up and more of us choosing not to connect."
In early 2003, Bianca made an impromptu visit to Paris to rejoin Sierra, and the two spent months creating music in Sierra's bathroom which, according to them, was the most isolated room in the apartment and had the best acoustics. The sisters took a lo-fi and experimental approach to production, utilizing a distinct vocal style, traditional instruments, and various improvised instruments such as toys, all recorded with one microphone and a "broken" pair of headphones. In a 2009 interview, Bianca stated that the decision to make music was also impromptu, and that after reuniting they had been "doing a lot of photography and started to just sort of document our daily adventures... recording was just sort of a natural progression of that... at no point were we, you know, aware of the goal of making a record... we intuitively really kind of stuck to that format without knowing it, like by making twelve songs and kind of thinking of it as that structure." The individual tracks created in the process were compiled into an album which would later be released as CocoRosie's debut, La Maison de Mon Rêve.
The sisters have said they only wanted a few copies of the album to be produced, planning to give the copies to friends. However, the CocoRosie act was signed to the independent record label Touch and Go Records in 2004, after the label allegedly "pursued them" and persuaded them to, and the album was released on March 9, 2004, to unexpected critical acclaim.

2005−2006: ''Beautiful Boyz'' and ''Noah's Ark''

CocoRosie released their second album, Noah's Ark, in 2005. The album includes collaborations with Anohni from Antony and the Johnsons, Devendra Banhart, and French rapper Spleen. The album was recorded in a variety of locations as the sisters traveled. The album's cover, a drawing by Bianca of three unicorns having sex while one of them vomits drops corresponding to the color spectrum, was selected by The Guardian and Pitchfork Media as one of the worst album covers of all time.
In 2005, Bianca Casady was in a relationship with Devendra Banhart, with Banhart living with Casady and her mother Christina at Christina's farm in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, a Romani village in southern France. Casady's relationship with Banhart ended in 2006. Banhart's 2007 album Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon detailed his break up with Casady.
In 2006, Sierra started a side project, Metallic Falcons, with friend Matteah Baim. The project is signed to Voodoo Eros Records, a new label started by Bianca with business partner Melissa Shimkovitz. Bianca also opened the Voodoo Eros Museum Of Nice Items, an art gallery and performance space in New York City most recently home to an exhibition of Bianca's art Red Bone Slim VS. Itself: an Exhibition of Drawings.