About 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.
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."
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."
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