Mirepoix and Smoke

VINYL FORMAT. Limited to 1000 copies; comes with a digital download! For thirty-one year old Minnesota native Ben Weaver, the follow-up to his lauded 2008 album, The Ax in the Oak, was literally cooked up in the kitchen. Weaver was working as a prep cook in a farm-to-table restaurant in Minneapolis, where the songs on his latest album, Mirepoix and Smoke, started to take shape. While The Ax in the Oak was more complex in its sound - the result of a collaboration between Weaver and Brian Deck (Califone, Iron and Wine) - Mirepoix and Smoke is a decidedly more bucolic affair; its songs are barely accompanied by more than Weaver's guitar or banjo and his voice, allowing for a more sensory experience of Weaver's signature lyrical poetics. You just don't hear Mirepoix and Smoke - you smell it, taste it, feel it and see it. As with Weaver's previous two releases, Mirepoix and Smoke was recorded at Chicago's Engine Studios, and was engineered by Neil Strauch (Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Iron and Wine, Margot and the Nuclear So and So's). Erica Froman, formerly of the dream-pop collective Anathallo, joined Ben on vocals and piano.