Tau Emerald - Travellers Two - CD

Travellers Two is a full length recording from the duo of Tara Burke (Fursaxa) and Sharron Kraus, recorded and mixed in Finland and Pennsylvania. Togerther Kraus & Burke create an ethereal record of dark-folk magic. Tara Burke and Sharron Kraus were due to travel to Finland together for a week but missed the flight, so instead they decided to spend the week recording together, and Travellers Two is the result. The time was spent out in the fields, visiting burial mounds, and then coming back to Sharron's home studio to work. They had played previously together and done some recording but this is the first time an album was conceived.

Fursaxa is Tara Burke. Formerly a member of the Silbreeze band UN, Tara started her Fursaxa project in 1999 after UN disbanded. After being a long time resident of Philadelphia, Tara decided to leave the "city of brotherly love" for the touring life. So from April 2005 to April 2006 she toured extensively throughout the UK, the USA, and Europe with friends and fellow musicians Jack Rose, Sharron Kraus, Alexander Tucker, Christina Carter, Marcia Bassett, and the Spires That In the Sunset Rise, to name a few. For her live performances she uses mostly looped vocals, flutes, and percussion, a Casio keyboard, guitar, and mandolin, in an attempt to transport her audience into the ethereal realms. On her forthcoming album Alone In the Dark Wood, she employs a myriad of instruments such as mandolin, guitar, violin, banjo, balalaika, organ, bells, flute, percussion, and voice. Tara has recently been collaborating with several other musicians. Espers member Helena Espvall and Tara have a duo called Anahita, and in 2006 released Arcana en Cantos on the Deserted Village label from Ireland. They are currently working on their second release. Currently, Fursaxa is playing and recording her music in the rural hills of Pennsylvania.

Sharron Kraus is a singer/musician/songwriter who creates music rooted in the folk traditions of England and Appalachia. Her work is characterized by soil-rich vocals, haunting banjo, fine acoustic guitar and visionary wordcraft. Her songs are populated by a carnival array of fatally charismatic characters, telling tales of enslavement, perversion, incest, obsession, love and death. Sharron’s live performances are stark, compelling, and delicate. As with her music, her performance continues the tradition of the balladeer. She is like the roving storyteller, bringing tales of terror, sadness and joy to a stranger’s hearth on a dark and stormy night.

Sharron’s debut album Beautiful Twisted was released by Australian psych label Camera Obscura in 2002, and received rave reviews around the world. It was listed in Rolling Stone Magazine’s Critics’ Top Albums of 2002. After touring with US psychedelic folk band The Iditarod, she collaborated with them on an album of wintry songs and soundscapes entitled Yuletide and released by avant/experimental label Elsie and Jack in 2003.

Sharron’s second solo album, Songs of Love and Loss, was recorded at home in Oxford and at Dungeon Studios in the Cotswolds. The album features Jane Griffiths on fiddle and viola, Jon Fletcher on harmonica and occasional guitar, banjo and vocals, Colin Fletcher on bass, as well as BBC Folk Award-winning fiddler Jon Boden and Grammy-nominated early music violinist Giles Lewin. The album was finished in Providence and mixed with Jeffrey Alexander (The Iditarod, Black Forest/Black Sea). Songs of Love and Loss is a natural follow-up to Beautiful Twisted, in places darker and more discordant, in others gentler and sweeter.

Other recent and ongoing collaborations include The Black Dove, an album written and recorded with Californian folk songsmith Christian Kiefer and Leaves From Off the Tree, an album of traditional songs recorded with Meg Baird and Helena Espvall released on Bo’ Weavil Recordings.

Sharron has been featured in The Wire, Dirty Linen, New Folk Sounds, Arthur Magazine, Ptolemaic Terrascope and Broken Face. She has been interviewed on BBC Radio 3 for ‘A Place Called England’ discussing the future of English folk music and recorded sessions for BBC Radio Scotland, Freakzone on Radio 6, and independent radio stations across the US. Her fanbase includes veteran folkies Shirley Collins and Archie Fisher as well as indie figureheads Michael Gira, David Tibet and Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore.