is the ringleader behind Secret Society, an 18-piece steampunk bigband that envisions an alternative musical history — one in which the dance orchestras that ruled the Swing Era never went extinct, but continued to evolve with the times, remaining a vital part of the musical landscape straight through the present day. Argue’s compositions bring together “a big, broad musical vocabulary” (New York Times), one which invokes “Duke Ellington and minimalism and Tortoise and Funkadelic and Elliott Carter and much else besides melding into one floating, shifting, dodging music” (zoilus.com). Secret Society have performed at a variety of venues around NYC, including Le Poisson Rouge, the Jazz Gallery, the Living Theatre, Makor, Flux Factory, and the Bowery Poetry Club, and recently completed a tour of Eastern Canada. Argue’s awards and commissions include the Jazz Gallery’s Large Ensemble Commissioning Series, the BMI Charlie Parker Composition Prize/Manny Albam Commission, the SOCAN/IAJE Emerging Jazz Composer Award, the SOCAN Award for Composition, the Brooklyn Philharmonic Composer Mentorship Program, the Down Beat Student Music Award, and grants from Meet The Composer, the American Music Center, and the Canada Council for the Arts.
Current Occupants
has published work in The Pushcart Prize Anthology XXXIII, The North American Review (Kurt Vonnegut Award 2007), Mississippi Review (2007 Story Prize), Inkwell and The Indiana Review. She received an MFA and The Himan Brown Award for Creative Writing from Brooklyn College. She is the Assistant Editor for One Story magazine and is one of those people who never pipes down about being from Philadelphia.
is a composer whose work demonstrates a willingness to work within and outside the confines of concert music. He likes to work with what he calls “cinderella instruments,” either by making percussion instruments (in the case of Junk) or by re-imagining other instruments (Krank, Cibola) as well as writing for instruments more common in rock music. More recent pieces have featured some electro-acoustic elements. His latest work, O Death, is concerned with bringing all these strands together.
has published essays, short fiction, and poetry in a variety of publications, including McSweeneys, Small Spiral Notebook, Tarpaulin Sky, DIAGRAM, the San Francisco Chronicle, Monkeybicycle, Stirring, ALARM, Identity Theory, and Rain Taxi. Find her work at www.summerblock.com.
is the nom de guerre of a computational neurobiologist currently completing her post-doc at the equally pseudonymous Fornier Institute.
is finishing work on his first novel, while beginning work on a dissertation about experimental German-language prose for a PhD at Cornell University. He lives with his wife in Berlin, and the two will soon move to the Midwest, where they will continue reading, writing and walking.
gleefully thieves concepts from mathematics and the sciences and makes poems of the spoils. (She also collaborates with her computer, as both of them have unhealthy obsessions with Markov chains. They live in Chicago.) Her work has been published in DIAGRAM and diode.
is 28 years old, married, no children and one beagle. After college, he spent two years in China before returning to Chicago and beginning PhD work. His dissertation (and life) research concerns the “grammar” of enchantments.
has waged a gentle assault on the pop idiom: 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. Dargel has performed on bills with Joanna Newsom, Final Fantasy (Owen Pallett), Grizzly Bear, Anti-Social Music, Eve Beglarian, Phil Kline, Nico Muhly, William Brittelle, Margaret Lancaster, and the American Composers Orchestra. His music-theater piece about love and voluntary amputation, Removable Parts, premiered in September 2007 at HERE Arts Center in NYC and has been nominated for three NY Innovative Theatre Awards, including Outstanding Solo Performance (Corey Dargel). In the fall of 2008, New Amsterdam Records will release Dargel’s sophomore album, Other People’s Love Songs. In 2009, Dargel will be writing new pieces for voice and chamber ensemble, commissioned by the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), NOW Ensemble, and Avian Music. Dargel has has performed as a vocalist in works by composers Eve Beglarian, Nick Brooke, Pauline Oliveros, John Cage, Phil Kline, Randall Woolf, Brenda Hutchinson, k. terumi shorb, and Jenny Olivia Johnson. Dargel’s writings about music have been published in Time Out Chicago, ArtsJournal and New Music Box. He has received awards and residencies from the American Composers Forum, the American Music Center, the Jerome Foundation, the Frederick Loewe Foundation, HERE Arts Center, the MacDowell Colony, New Dramatists, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts.