Oregon Music News

It’s all about the ladies. Women, girls, females, muses, vixens…That’s right, it’s Siren Nation. The Portland organization who brings unique arts experiences to the Rose City throughout the year, culminates in their self-titled festival each November. The Fourth Annual Siren Nation Festival is underway this weekend with all sorts of female-generated art to look forward to — and even cooler, they are the only ones doing just this. It’s a women’s collective — by women, for women — created to support, encourage and educate female artists of all ages and backgrounds. In addition, they are committed to an annual festival that celebrates their day-to-day work.

At the festival you can experience exhibitions of female artists in the genres of music, film, performance and visual art. Siren Nation’s mission is to “inspire and empower women of all ages to create their own art and to highlight the many achievements of women in the arts.”

That it’s based in Portland is no surprise really, considering our penchant for producing innovative arts-based exhibitions. But, the caliber and mission of this festival is special enough that it could be expected to be found in other, larger cities just as easily — and really, it should be echoed elsewhere. Siren Nation wants to promote female artists to create sustainable careers — as artists. Whether that means facilitating collaboration and networking relationships within the community, working to help advertise and gain media recognition, or providing the encouragement and empowerment needed by new artists, or honoring experienced ones.

“We envision a society where gender plays no part in determining an artists’ potential for success, for being heard or for being seen.”

Thursday started the festival off with the “Sometimes A Great Notion” art show by women of the Pacific Northwest at the Albina Press. Friday and Saturday feature local musical acts at Someday Lounge, and Sunday offers a fun Art & Craft sale at the McMenamin’s Kennedy School. In addition, Oregon Music News contributor Ana Ammann will be facilitating Sunday’s “Women in Print/New Media” workshop panel with Renee Mitchell (former Oregonian columnist and Pulitzer nominee), Beth Slovic (Willamette Week), and Andi Zeisler (Co-founder, Bitch Media) at the Kennedy School.

Music is our specialty, here’s who to look forward to:

Since her Portland club debut in 2000, DJ Anjali has existed as the city’s primary advocate (and dance missionary) for the many varied electronic sounds of the South Asian diaspora. Along with her partner, The Incredible Kid, they introduced “bhangra” & “Bollywood” to the dance floors of Portland. Well-known as a dance floor instigator, you can check her out at one of her continuously monthly Portland party originals: ANDAZ (since 2002, now at Rotture) & ATLAS (Holocene since 2003), as well as her weekly radio show on KBOO 90.7FM, Tuesday evenings 10pm to midnight.

Anomie Belle arrived in Seattle (in the fall of 2006) itching to ambush the ears and minds of listeners. The haunting melodies that had so often soothed the crowded nature of Anomie’s own mind, materialized, with angsty experimental soundscapes and provocative lyrics set to introspective urban beats. She recorded Sleeping Patterns in solitude over the next two years while playing live shows to test her ideas on ever-so-willing Seattleites. Anomie has become active in empowering the next generation of female musicians to develop skills as producers and engineers, mentoring young women in audio recording, electronic music production, and film composition through several local nonprofit organizations.

Annie Bethancourt is a singer/songwriter with an arresting voice and a story to tell. The daughter of one-time traveling folk musicians, Bethancourt grew up memorizing all the lyrics to Paul Simon songs, singing little ditties into hand-held tape recorders, and playing the piano with her toothbrush. From her very first release, 2002‚Ä≤s The Garage Sessions, she has been heralded as an angelic voice with “a lot of talent on her lips and at her fingertips.” Now splitting her time between the firs of Portland, Oregon and the palm trees of Costa Rica, Bethancourt lives a life of wanderlust, and her music is, just like her scenery, an ever-changing mixture of people and places, strange scenarios, and quirky tales.

Sara Jackson-Holman, a Portland Oregon native, was raised in the quiet town of Bend, Oregon. From an early age, Jackson-Holman was also in love with reading, beautiful words, good literature, metaphors, and poetry. And ever since she could speak, she loved to sing. In the March of 2008, she began to reconcile her love of piano, poetry, singing, and pop music, and became fascinated with this medium of communication that so happily married her favorite passions. Her voice smoky and warm, she sings of the things that fill her head: dreams, the sea and sky and trees, belonging and loneliness and love, longing and forgetting and remembering. Her songs are haunted by the unexpected fusion of the classically influenced piano, wistful strings, strange harmonies, and pop bent.

Although Erin McKeown started writing songs while still in high school in her hometown Fredericksburg, Virginia, she really began earning her chops while attending Brown University, releasing two albums before graduation and gigging on weekends whenever and wherever possible. She hasn’t slowed down, famously averaging 200 live shows a year. As a multi-instrumentalist, Erin is in demand as a session player, recording vocals, piano, bass lines and of course guitar tracks for other artists’ records all while steadily working material that became Hundreds of Lions. Erin will be performing at Siren Nation as part of her “DISTILLATION” 10th Anniversary Tour.

She sounds like she might have been born a coal miner’s daughter in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky, or maybe grown up next door to her daddy’s blacksmith forge outside Winchester, Virginia. But while Zoe Muth (pronounced Mewth) has the authentic, honky-tonk, angel-aura of Loretta Lynn and Patsy Cline in her voice. She’s the woman who is helping to turn Seattle, Washington, from the capital of grunge into a northwest heartland of purest Americana.

Her debut album, Zoe Muth and The Lost High Rollers was greeted like good ole blue-collar manna by country music fans who had grown tired of having their odes to heartbreak popified and their tales of crying tears into beers click-tracked to anaemic perfection.

Songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Tara Jane ONeil creates melodic and experimental music under her own name and in collaboration with other artists, bands, and filmmakers. Her work innately crosses genres and boundaries—drawings that morph from natural forms to linear abstractions, melodic songcraft melded with experimental noise; live performances that range from solo singing to large ensemble improvisation; and dance, film and theater scores-each telling the story in a dialect all their own. Though they spring from the same source, each piece takes a distinct form—several genies emerging from a single lamp.

From her Brooklyn apartment in New York, Katie Sawicki has brought emotion back to urban edge folk. Songs crafted from years on the road, past loves, contemplations of a changing music industry and folk ruminations of the crowded city life define this singer/songwriter. Hailed as a “Singstress, Songwriter, Lyrical Genius” (Encore Magazine), Sawicki is a self-taught guitarist, quickly making a name for herself. In conjunction with a move to the Northwest, Sawicki released, Time Spent Lost, a record that defines a new kind of indie music, blending the roots of contemporary folk with experimental production elements.

A native of Portland, Oregon, songwriter and singer Shelley Short grew up among characters and artists in a wood-heated home full of books, records, and well-cooked meals. As Short recounts: “It was like growing up in a time machine; in some ways we lived like in 1876, chopping wood, growing our own food, wearing old clothes in a Victorian home and singing our own songs. Other times it seemed like we were living in 1955, driving around Cadillacs and Studebakers and listening to Jonny Ray and The Flamingos. And yet it all felt like growing up in a blurring movie made in 1963, full of these big personalities. As a kid I grew up so accustomed to falling asleep to the sound of talk and laughter that when I moved out, the silence got to me.”

Both Friday and Saturday nights performances start at 7:30 PM at Someday Lounge. Tickets are $15 for a single night, or you can get in with your weekend pass. Oregon Music News is giving away two weekend passes, comment below to win one!