Two Dark Birds

“This is big-feeling, open-hearted music that meets the current chaos head-on, and sings anyway.” - Add to Wantlist

Our fifth album "Dreamers of the Golden Dream" is out now! Reservoir is the fourth album from Two Dark Birds, a band from Pakatakan Mountain in The Catskills. These songs were written to accompany the audiobook version of Nina Shengold's beautiful new memoir Reservoir Year. The album dives deep into the natural world of the Ashokan Reservoir and the surrounding Catskill Mountains. We crafted a set of mostly instrumentals to match the vibe -- woody, watery, meditative, deeply Catskillian. Praise for Two Dark Birds first three albums:

“Bow, the latest luminous and ambitious collection of poet-grade and quietly experimental folk music written by Steve Koester and performed by his loose assemblage of Catskill cronies.” - HV1

“…poised, structured, self-aware, ambitious.” - DVEIGHT

"...there certainly is a magic to it, a kind of backwoods witchery that the only the best of the style can really capture. Steve Koester, creative force behind Two Dark Birds and formerly of Maplewood and Punchdrunk, is one such luminary. His forthcoming album Bow (the third from Two Dark Birds) displays that spiritual connection to the land in a way his previous works have only touched on." - Culture Collide

“Bow is brimming with pastoral energy and light. There's a quiet dignity to the songs, no grand or elaborate veneering.” - Chronogram

“Strange and beautiful… It’s a record heard best with a beer in hand beneath a star-punched sky.“ Nylon

“…a masterful soundtrack to self-reflection.“ Men’s Vogue

“…one of this year’s most subdued and moving releases.“ The Big Takeover

“In Koester’s songs and in his delivery, you will hear the imprint of the broken-but-not-beaten American Bard, from Parsons and Van Zandt to Tweedy. Koester takes on the populist challenge of the form: how to be at once folk-accessible and lit-deep, how to wed image to experience and emotion without ever getting too fine or too poetic for the idiom. Koester hits the mark again and again, especially when exploring darker themes and archetypal narratives in songs like ‘Lake Algonquin,’ ‘Ryder Hollow’ and the inspired hill-folk haiku of the title track. It’s also an album of subtle and spiritually inflected love-and-loss songs, such as the standout track ‘Song for Clementine.’ Woodstock Times

“Steve Koester is a folk singer whose darknesses and frailty are worn on his sleeve, the kind of sorcery you get from living a life in old mountains like the Catskills. He’s got a beautiful album out called Songs for the New.” yvynyl

Prior to Two Dark Birds, Koester also fronted the bands Maplewood, Koester & Punchdrunk, who altogether have released eleven acclaimed albums and toured extensively throughout the US and Europe. The music has been called "knockout gorgeous" , "strange and beautiful", and "timeless. . . great rock music" and has received glowing reviews everywhere from Fader and Nylon to The Village Voice and The NY Times, showing up on year-end "Best" lists in Magnet, Popmatters, Rhapsody, Disclaimer and more. Koester has also written, recorded and produced a wide variety of songs for film, commercials and TV.