TARA JANE O'NEIL

Event information

Queer Union presents:

TARA JANE O'NEIL (Portland, OR)
Songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Tara Jane ONeil has been creating melodic and experimental music since the tender age of 19 when she played bass for the influential and short lived art-punk ensemble Rodan in her hometown of Louisville, KY.
'Ever since she began putting her name on the front of her albums, Tara Jane O'Neil has perfected the art of writing songs that perfectly encapsulate both the comfort of misery and the misery of comfort. … What makes this album [In Circles] stand out is O'Neil's ability to seamlessly mix electronics (such as the aforementioned tape loops, as well as some judiciously used feedback and guitar effects) into songs that, left alone, could very well have come from the dilapidated porch of a forlorn Kentucky shack. … Tara Jane O'Neil is at the height of her creative powers, and In Circles is a confident document of her strengths.' — Pitchfork, January 2007 ( 8.1)
'With Kentucky's Rodan, O'Neil helped invent 'math rock', giving egghead music students who should have been practising their composition a viable framework within which to play extremely loud guitars. Her 10-year solo career has pursued quieter but equally interesting routes. You Sound, Reflect opens with the metronomic palate cleanser of 'Take the Waking', before revealing its basic premise. Here's a set of folkish, acoustic-based songs of apparent open hearted simplicity, each skewed with varying degrees of strangeness by O'Neil and her supporting cast. The album resists the urge to rock, wraps its experimental inclinations within some superficially delightful shapes and holds you in a state of imminent apprehension for the sort of cliched climax it rightly refuses to deliver. Tara Jane is toying with you. And you love it. ' — Stewart Lee, The Sunday Times (UK), 8/01/04
www.tarajaneoneil.com

MUSIC FOR ONE (London)
..is your breath that you see on a cold day.
Stark but beautiful guitar motifs emerge as skeletons of songs but the sound is also as chaotic as the times we live in with effects boxes twisting the sound into a cavernous roar of feedback and throbbing clicks. Light and dark, loud and quiet.
www.musicforone.com

CONGREGATION (London)
...are Victoria Yeulet and Ben Prosser. Together they make songs that draw from their mutual loves of old-time, blues, country,folk, gospel, r'n'b and rockabilly which they practice on wooden floors with tape players, voices, pedals and tea.
Classy old school blues gospel soul delivered via slide, guitar, bass drum and leg bells.
www.myspace.com/congregationband