Rod Smoth is the project of Mississippi singer and guitarist Reed Smith. Raised among a family of southern gospel singers, Smith first picked up the guitar when he was eight years old. He began playing music with his family and graduated to heavier music in his teens, playing with various bands across the diverse and fertile Jackson, MS music scene. He released his debut album Rod Smoth in 2020, a beguiling collection that mixed the eerie quite of folk music with the darkness of stoner rock. After the release, Smith decamped ti an artists’ residency in Clarksdale, MS where he worked at a hotel and a feed store in exchange for a place to live. This was an isolating time, when covid hit, things got even more isolated. As always in difficult time, Smith turned to music. Only this time he was alone.

Rod Smoth’s second album “Living in Nowhere” is a melancholy record, simmering with the darkness of everyday experience, the loneliness and isolation that comes from struggling in a small southern town in your mid-twenties. But it’s far from hopeless, a record about reaching out to the world from a kind of self-exile. There’s a new warmth and openheartedness to the music, a cleo-eyed look at a loss and a longing for something more.

Nicole Tester is a singer/songwriter based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Her eclectic indie folk sound pulls from the roots of the Appalachian mountains where she was raised, intertwined with modern indie folk/rock/pop influences. Balancing wit and humor with introspection and insight, she is sure to cover a vast expanse of emotional ground. Her songs serve as a way to tell stories, process experiences, and simultaneously attempt to find common ground to connect with others.