Alela Diane grew up singing with her musician parents and performing in the school choir. She taught herself guitar, and began writing songs which blend tense, trance-like arpeggios with warm vocals and meditative lyrics about family and nature. Her first recordings were self-released in 2003 as Forest Parade. Her first solo public appearances were at the invitation of fellow Nevada City native Joanna Newsom. She also did a stint in the Nevada City slow grass band Black Bear before continuing with her solo pursuits.

The songs for her album, 'The Pirate’s Gospel', were written on a trip to Europe. They were recorded in her father’s studio and were initially self-released in 2004, in paper and lace sleeves with hand lettering. The album was issued in revised form by Holocene Music in October 2006, and received widespread critical acclaim.

A new song, "Dry Grass and Shadows", was issued on a compilation of Nevada City artists, and five more new songs were issued on a limited-edition 10" vinyl pressing, Songs Whistled Through White Teeth, released in the UK in October 2006. The Pirate's Gospel was released in the UK on Names Records in April 2007, garnering favorable reviews in The Times and NME.

Alela Diane has toured in the USA both solo and with Tom Brosseau, and has also opened for The Decemberists, Iron & Wine, Akron/Family and Vashti Bunyan. She performed in the UK in April and August 2007. While in the UK in August of 2007 she performed at the Green Man Festival in Wales. She also toured extensively in Europe (UK, Ireland, France, Switzerland, Netherlands, Belgium, Germany) in March, April and May 2008.

She lent her voice to an album of cover versions, The Silence of Love by Headless Heroes, released in November 2008, recorded by Eddie Bezalel and Hugo Nicholson with musicians Joey Waronker, Gus Seyffert, Leo Abrahams and Woody Jackson.

Her second album, To Be Still, was released in February 2009

Marissa Nadler performs with an intricate finger-style on the guitar, 12 string guitar, ukele, and 5-string banjo, as well as the latest addition of keyboards and organ. Yet it is often her voice that is a shuttle towards another time, a haunting soprano reverberating with melancholy and longing. From her earliest incarnations, Marissa appeared with music that was unique and gorgeous, skillfully and simply hinting at the songs of the sea, the haunting chansons of maidens, the cowboy ditties of ranchers, and the funerary processions of mourners. The eerie quality of her atmospheric music gives her songs a timelessness and sadness that is often described as other worldly.

Her many early, homemade CD’s, lovingly decorated and inscribed to her nearest and dearest brought the attention of Eclipse Records in Arizona. Ed Hardy, who has gained a reputation for releasing beautiful, eclectic music, released Marissa’s first LP Ballads of Living and Dying in 2004, a release that Pitchfork called “a landscape you may want to get lost in for a century or two,” and that The Wire called “a beauty.” Ballads of Living and Dying was released in the UK in early February of 2005 by Beautiful Happiness Records, meeting the same response overseas as it did in the States, with the Guardian calling it “uncommonly lovely...hard to get out of your head.” The Saga of Mayflower May has garnered the same acclaim as did Ballads of Living and Dying, with Pitchfork calling it, among other things, simply an "entralling album".

Marissa Nadler is currently recording a new project. Upcoming shows are in New York City, and she touring Europe through the winter.

Sometimes you just need to step back and simplify.

In a world where so much seems to be driven by flashiness and technology and where so many things can tend to feel out of your control, sometimes the solution is to go back to square-one, re-evaluate and reinvent.

Being "media babies" themselves, Orba Squara did just that. Trading in walls of synthesizers for a collection of organic instruments, Orba Squara uses an ear pointed toward the uncommon and directs it at what would typically be considered a "traditional" genre.