Corey Dargel

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.