Tiny Vipers

Seattle-based singer/songwriter Jesy Fortino creates the understated, primarily acoustic sound of Tiny Vipers. A self-taught guitarist, she produces intricate performances paired with solitary vocals that lend her material a singularly spectral character. Although she participated in several groups, Fortino discovered greater satisfaction working solo and launched Tiny Vipers in the early 2000s. Her first release, a self-titled EP, appeared in 2004, followed two years later by Empire Prism, which contained a track approaching thirty minutes. In 2006 a friend at Sub Pop introduced her recordings to the label, resulting in a signing. The imprint issued her first album, Hands Across the Void, during summer 2007. Two further projects surfaced in 2009: the full-length Life on Earth and the Weak Moments of the Shadows EP, assembled from material recorded during a Daytrotter session. Subsequent collaborations involved Balmorhea, the Sight Below, and Orcas. Fortino then joined Grouper’s Liz Harris under the name Mirrorring, releasing the debut album Foreign Body in 2012. She set music aside for several years while pursuing a civil engineering degree at the University of Washington, yet continued sketching ideas on keyboard. Several of those sketches surfaced in 2015 as the Ambience3 single on Box Bedroom Rebels. Fortino extended this approach on Laughter, Tiny Vipers’ first release for Ba Da Bing, a set of works that recalled Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius and appeared in 2017.