Saturday December 6 • the Music Gallery presents
REMOVABLE PARTS
A series of love songs about voluntary amputation — created by Corey Dargel (New York)
Performed by Kathleen Supové (piano) and Corey Dargel (voice and electronics), and directed by Emma Griffin with dances by Yvan Greenberg.

With special opening set by Ryan Driver, solo piano

Location: The Music Gallery at St. George the Martyr Church, 197 John St. at Stephanie
Doors 7pm, concert 8pm
Tickets: $15 regular, $10 member, student + advance
Advance tickets at TicketWeb — BUY NOW!

Removable Parts (9pm) is a theatrical series of love songs about voluntary amputation. In an updated version of the lover's plaint, the unrequited lover – whose heart is broken – begins to question the usefulness of his other body parts. Loosely based on medical journals, psychiatric case studies, and actors' monologue collections, the songs and banter in Removable Parts take a sideways look at amputees, devotees, and wannabes, with a balance of empathy and irreverence.

Removable Parts received the award for “Outstanding Performance-Art Production” from the 2008 New York Innovative Theatre Awards.

http://www.removableparts.com

Corey Dargel (composer/lyricist/singer) has been called “a baroquely unclassifiable artist” (New Yorker) who makes songs that "smartly and impishly blur the boundaries between contemporary classical idioms and pop" (New York Times). His gentle assault on the pop idiom creates a tension that pervades his music: Deadpan and detached vocals reveal heartbreaking intimacies, awkward and obtrusive drum patterns struggle against fragile harmonies, vocals and music uneasily opposing each other as songs stumble to their ends. He has shared the stage with Joanna Newsom, Final Fantasy, Grizzly Bear, Anti-Social Music, Nico Muhly, the American Composers Orchestra, and others. Dargel’s debut album, Less Famous Than You, was released on Use Your Teeth (London) in May 2006 and named one of the Top Ten Albums of 2006 by Time Out New York. His forthcoming album, Other People’s Love Songs, will be released October 28th on New Amsterdam Records. Dargel is presently composing new works for singer and chamber ensemble, commissioned by the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), Avian Music, and NOW Ensemble.

Kathleen Supové (pianist) is one of America's most acclaimed and versatile contemporary music pianists, known for continually redefining what it means to be a pianist/keyboardist/performance artist in today's world. She regularly presents a series of solo concerts entitled The Exploding Piano at The Flea Theater in NYC, in which she has pioneered both repertoire and presentational concepts involving electronics, theatrics, and cutting edge works for Yamaha Disklavier. She has presented a number of concert theatre works there, most notably the evening-length staged piece for singing/reciting/moving pianist called Jitters (music by Randall Woolf and texts/directing by Valeria Vasilevski). In addition, Kathleen has been a featured artist in the Summer 2000 issue of Yale Theater Journal, which was devoted to concert theatre. She has performed throughout the US, at universities and conservatories, and as a featured guest at many new music festivals, most recently the NIME Festival in NYC and the Other Minds Festival in San Francisco. Kathleen's most recent solo CD, Infusion, is on the Koch label.

"Removable Parts pleases on almost every level... with an intelligent grace that is as moving as it is impressive." — New York Times

"Bizarre, complex, and strangely moving, Removable Parts is lyrically brilliant and truly original." — Flavorpill

"...at once uproarious and harrowing..." — The New Yorker

http://www.removableparts.com

Ryan Driver (8pm) is a Toronto-based musician who plays, writes and sings music in spirals and swirls through the void of everythingness. Quiet absurdity, free improvisation, psychedelic reinterpretation of jazz ballads, and performance as a soloist and in a multitude of peculiar ensembles, using a variety of instruments and aesthetics, have long been his main foci.

Ryan is a prominent figure in the catalogue of the Rat-Drifting record label, which was started in 2001 by Eric Chenaux and Martin Arnold. The 16th and most recent addition to this catalogue is Feeler Of Pure Joy, the first album comprised exclusively of songs by Ryan Driver. This collection features an array of intimate psychedelic soul/country/folk songs with musical support from Chenaux, Arnold, Jean Martin, Andrew Downing, and Jennifer Castle. This album and the last album by The Silt (with Doug Tielli and Marcus Quin) are being re-released in Europe and elsewhere by Fire Records this year. Ryan has toured in Europe with Sandro Perri (a.k.a. Polmo Polpo) and performed with The Reveries, a surreal lounge trio that uses mouth-speakers and other unconventional instruments to reconfigure popular ballads, at the Angelica Festival of New Music in Bologna.

http://www.myspace.com/ryandriver