MP3 Stephanie Rearick - Democracy

Dark political piano/vocal (sometimes with trumpet and looping) songs with moments of pure beauty peeking through.

14 MP3 Songs
POP: Piano, ROCK: Progressive Rock



Details:
Stephanie Rearick, based in Madison, Wisconsin, has been performing and recording since 1993, as frontwoman for Your Mom, Your Mom SRO, and The Coma Savants, occasional side-musician, film scorer and solo artist.

Rearick's work is dark piano-driven classical/cabaret/pop. In addition to piano, Rearick sings, plays trumpet, and builds pieces with various sound sources live on a Boss Loopstation.

Rearick's music is featured in "Saving Jackie," a film by SA Burks that screened at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival.

Recent Releases: Democracy, Star Belly, Eugene Chadbourne's Year of the Chadfest and Leaders Split Crack (Blues 2005) and No Camouflage, a Madison Anti-war compilation CD.

Stephanie Rearick won the 2006 Madison Area Music Award (MAMA) for Best Unique Album (Star Belly) and the 2004 MAMAs for Best Classical Album (The Bucket Rider) and Best Classical Artist.

Reviews:

Stephanie Rearick is slowly, carefully tweaking her recorded personality as a solo pianist and singer/songwriter who makes use of a variety of sometimes daring enhancements. Star Belly, her 2005 set of songs, seems not remarkably different then previous sets such as The Bucket Rider. Her vocal overdubbing and harmonizing are marvelous, bringing forth a multitude of possibilities as organically as a fistful of hollyhock seeds. The piano continues as a stronger and stronger element, left-hand parts tromping out a framework that a weaker player would have to wheedle out of a rhythm section. Both piano and vocal come in and out of a production treatment in which aspects move from large, sometimes obscuring amounts of processing to the purest of simplicity. When this takes place during the course of a single song, it is as if the listener has fallen asleep in an antique auction and woken up alone, back in his own bedroom. Several pieces such as "Twilight Fog" have memorable melodic lines, allowed an amazing breadth through the subtlest of production, the performer confident enough to practically ignore her own strengths. Rearick also presents interesting cover versions of pieces by Tom Waits, Brian Eno, and David Bowie. - Eugene Chadbourne at itunes

For Madison's Stephanie Rearick, labels like 'classical' and 'arty' don't do justice to the genre-bending music box of sound that comes from her upright piano. It's by turns adventurous and accessible, ancient and futuristic, comforting and scary. On her 2005 album Star Belly, sounds from an old west barroom mingle with high concept cabaret and psychedelic distortion. -- The Onion

Imagine Tom Waits reincarnated as Debussy, playing Joni Mitchell versions of Edgar Allen Poe poems on a 1920s era piano, and you get an approximate sense of the influences singer/pianist Stephanie Rearick channels on the way to making her very unique, idiosyncratic art pop.
-- Berkshire Eagle

From soothing instrumentals to ethereal pop to dark ditties to witty excursions, Rearick delivers a cornucopia of aural moods, all via her upright piano and occasionally her trumpet. -- Goldmine