Live at the Parkfield Cafe
Anna Mieke
NOVEMBER 15, 2023 | 7:00pm
Join us in the Parkfield Cafe for an intimate concert with Irish singer-Songwriter Anna Mieke!
Originally from Wicklow, Ireland, Anna Mieke is a vocalist and multi-instrumentalist whose lyricism and enveloping compositions toe the line between folk forms and vivid dreamscapes, drawing on traditional and contemporary motifs. The lyrically ornate and instrumental delicacy of her work, alongside flowing atmospheric arrangements creates a sound world that is distinctly her own.
Her music is the surreal soundtrack of a vast personal plain steeped in nostalgia, family, memory, death and dreaming—where gritty reality and romanticism meet. This duality is the thematic core of her second album Theatre, which focuses on the conflict between permanence and temporality, the immaterial and material, and how memories of places and people fade, warp, and reinvent themselves over time.
Anna Mieke’s musical landscape developed from years of collaborations, performance and experimenting, during her time living in both Cork and Dublin. The release of Anna’s debut album, Idle Mind, in 2019, garnered Anna Mieke a nomination in the 'Best Emerging Act’ category at the RTÉ Folk Awards. Early 2022 saw her headline tours across Spain, UK, Ireland and further afield, with a week-long residency in New York (May 2022), collaborating with NYC-based musicians and composers.
February 2023 took her and her band back to North America for a 16-date headline tour, followed by support tours with Florist and Iron and Wine across Europe and the US. In recent years, she has also toured with and supported acts including Wilco, Anais Mitchell, Lankum and Bonny Light Horseman. She has performed at The Edinburgh Fringe Festival and collaborated with Crash Ensemble, Linda Buckley and Adrian Crowley. Outside of her solo material, Anna Mieke played cello with HEX, a Cork-based improvisatory group, and developed her vocals as one-third of the singing group, Rufous Nightjar, both of which allowed her to further explore sound manipulation, improvisation and complex harmonic arrangements.
Theatre, which she recorded + co-produced with Nick Rayner and features contributions from long-standing bandmates Ryan Hargadon (Kojaque) and Matthew Jacobson (UMBRA), as well as Rozi Leyden (Rozi Plain), Brían Mac Gloinn (Ye Vagabonds), Lina Andonovska, Alannah Thornburgh and Cora Venus Lunny, was released in 2022 and received praise from The Guardian, Brooklyn Vegan and MOJO among others. Uncut praised the album as “beguiling and really rather wonderful” while the Revue described the songs as having “a combination of Agnes Obel’s symphonic experimentation and Aldous Harding’s lyrical creativity…an artist who brilliantly incorporates fantasy, and mysticism into music”. Theatre was nominated for Album of the Year (2022) in Ireland’s ‘Choice Awards’.
Anna Mieke returns to North America in November this year, for her second headline tour there since the release of Theatre.
“Anna Mieke mines a rich seam of nostalgia and loss – and her extensive travels – on a dreamlike second album”
- The Guardian, ★★★★
"Seraphim” is a warm embrace of stealthily picked guitar, saxophone ringlets, propelling drums, and a voice that's both decadent and woody, like temple-cleansing incense.”
“Beguiling and really rather wonderful”
- Uncut, 8/10
“What an introduction to an artist who reminds us as a combination of Agnes Obel’s symphonic experimentation and Aldous Harding’s lyrical creativity…an artist who brilliantly incorporates folklore, fantasy, and mysticism into music”
“The new song beautifully employs the richly layered sonic texture Anna cultivated in Theatre, with scratchy strings, flutes, clarinet, pattering drums, and acoustic guitar all featured in the mix”
"'For A Time', the second preview we’ve gotten of her forthcoming album, 'Theatre', is just as impressive; a lush, beautifully orchestrated composition that showcases her talents as an arranger and as a vocalist."
“…a sweet sound of rolling hills and valleys, and finely portraying the dulcet atmosphere found in this bucolic alt.folk collection”
“…this entire record feels slightly hazed-out and blurred, a beautiful noonday dream”
“Theatre dances with grand, expressive musical gestures…[it] entrances with every lyric, note and beat.”
“A deliciously bearable lightness of being defines Anna Mieke’s debut album. It’s a strikingly confident collection of 10 songs, full of blue sky thinking and wide open horizons... Idle Mind is a slow burner (in the very best sense) that promises many fresh revelations with each return visit. A deliriously renewable energy source”
“Indeed, Idle Mind is not just a stunning debut record, nor is it just an amazing Irish record: it’s a record that proves Mieke to be one of the most promising artists on the Irish independent sphere and mature musician and songwriter whose work deserves to be heard far and wide”
- The Thin Air