SORA BUILDS A NEW MUSICAL WORLD WITH ELEMENTS OF NEW AGE, FOLK, WORLD-FUSION AND CLASSICAL Scorpion Moon is Sora’s fourth recording and this extraordinary vocalist and songwriter from Canada just keeps getting better. Her voice soars like an angel, dips and glides, becomes understated for a few seconds and then roars back with a fury. This woman sings with a passion. And she writes that way too. The eleven tunes on this new album are her compositions. Her lyrics often use legends, myths and ancient stories as the starting point as she paints the drama from a new perspective. If you need a category for her music, new age will probably do as well as any other since that genre generously opens its doors to all types of sounds including vocals and world-fusion. Sora uses mostly acoustic instrumentation, including many ethnic instruments from all over the globe, so her music has elements of folk (primarily because of the vocals and her non-pop lyrical approach), world-fusion (because of all those instruments) and classical (because her voice has some operatic qualities and quite a few tunes feature violin and cello). Here is the catch. When she was a youngster, and going through high school, Sora studied and played regularly before audiences both folk music on the fiddle and classical music on the violin (the instrument’s name semantics showing how she bridged two very-different musical worlds). So she comes by these sounds naturally because of her training, but now blends it all together. The songs ranges from the uptempo frenzy of the tune “Savage” to the mellow love-in-the-ocean requiem “Mermaid Song.” There is a song about a “Hero” (a classic archetype) with acoustic guitar and Celtic harp, but she also tackles a tune titled “City” in which she says she tried to “encapsulate the hum, pulse and heartbeat of a large city.” So come to this CD for the voice, stay for the lyrics and enjoy the subtle yet exquisite instrumentation throughout.