Easily one of the best acts we (sort of) saw at SXSW06 was Lavender Diamond. We had friends in the crowd but we missed them; if we'd been thinking more sharply, we might spotted them and stayed for the whole set. Which was, by their accounts, really amazing.

Here's hoping Miss Becky Stark, her ruby throat, and her backing trio (quartet? I can't recall...) will return to Austin soon; please come see us again!

You can download two tracks from her first EP, The Cavalry of Light, released in 2005, at the Lavender Diamond website. The four songs on the EP are full of guarded, quivering longing and loss that sound like a cross between a lost Edwardian parlour song (like the kind you'd stumble across a reference to in an EM Forster novel) and clear, clarion-voiced simplicity of folkies like Judee Sill and Joan Baez with a dash of 70's AM gold-pop (touchpoint: The Carpenters) for good measure. The result is very Los Angeles yet still delightfully transcendant and luminous, much like Stark's appearance in performance. On Friday, she was wearing what appeared to be a gorgeous lavender (natch) chiffon vintage gown that made her appear as like a very young Peggy Lee circa 1941 fronting the Benny Goodman Orchestra: Winsome but wise beyond her years.

Lavender Diamond -- You Broke My Heart
Lavender Diamond -- Rise In the Springtime

There's also a track from her solo album available too, "Why oh why."