Carol Lipnik - vocals, guitar, toy piano,
Dred Scott - keyboards, percussion, guitar, accordion,
Jacob Lawson - electric violin, electronics,
Influences
Lotte Lenya, Kurt Weill, Laura Nyro, Clowns, Nina Simone, Skip James, Joni Mitchell, Montserrat Figueras, Nico, Arthur Lee and Love, Federico Fellini, Yma Sumac, The Meru Fairy Twins from Mothra, Paolo Conte, The Beatles, Yoko Ono, Buffy Saint Marie's Illuminations, Dr. John, The Velvet Underground, Klaus Nomi, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Joseph Cornell, Jacques Brel, Idjah Hadidjah, Tim Buckley, Brian Ferry, Diane Arbus, Nick Drake, Brian Eno, Leonard Cohen, Judee Sill, Rumi, Elly Stone, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, David Bowie, Howlin' Wolf, Meredith Monk, Alfred Hitchcock, Jane Bowles, Marcel Carne, Astor Piazolla, Marvin Gaye, Brian Wilson, Radiohead, The Doors, Shirley Horn, Hoagy Carmichael, The Creature From The Black Lagoon, Laurie Anderson, Anna Domino, Giulietta Masina, Essra Mowhawk, Rickie Lee Jones, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Phillip K. Dick, Odetta, Television, Nelson Algren, James Tate, Robert Frank, Caetano Veloso, Linda Perhacs, Tom Ward, Woody Allen, Michael Powell, Bob Dylan, Josh Matthews, David Kannenstine, Jefferson Airplane, Kate Bush, Serge Gainsbourg, Danny Kaye, Dory Previn, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Astro Boy, John Kelly, Teresa Stratas, David Lynch, Betty Carter, Theda Bara, Hank Williams, Al Green, Rex, The Delfonics, Cab Calloway, William Faulkner, Harold Arlen, Martin Denny, The Smiths, Bob and Earl, Richard Thompson, Roger Miller, Isaac Hayes, Virginia Woolf, Flannery O'Connor, Curtis Mayfield, Steven Colbert, Marriane Faithfull, The Band,Maria Callas, Cassandra Wilson, Patti Smith, Chet Baker, Sylvia Plath, Antony and The Johnsons, Excuma, Mary Oliver, Lenny Bruce, Salman Rushdie, Bradford Reed, Rainer Maria Rilke, Andy Warhol, Ann Peebles, Edward Hopper, Django Reinhardt, Tess Gallagher, Laura Jensen, Giorgio Morandi, Aretha Franklin, Nilsson, Jon Stewart,...
Avant-siren chanteuse Carol Lipnik with her wildly eclectic accompanist, the acclaimed keyboardist Dred Scott, conjure an authentic Coney Island Parlor Punk music that is by turns, phantasmagorical, carnivalesque, gleefully macabre, and irresistibly compelling. Lipnik’s dramatic 4-octave voice coupled with her poetic,
genre-defying songs (many from the point of view of lovelorn beasts and freaks like The Creature From The Black Lagoon and The Werewolf) are thrilling, chilling and heartbreaking.
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Vocalist and Songwriter, Carol Lipnik, grew up in Coney Island in the midst of its long decline. Her earliest memories are of shyly pedaling a blue banana seat bicycle around the abandoned amusement park (especially off season) and staring up at the totem-like decaying rides. After studying fine arts at Pratt Institute and The Art Students League, Carol opted for the immediate emotional gratification of singing, and found that she had a natural knack for it, as well as a seemingly limitless 4 & 1/2 octave vocal range. She drew from her visual arts training to create a singular cinematic style rooted in Blues, Pre War Berlin Cabaret, Folk, etc, as filtered through her very own Carnival, and Psychedelic sensibilities. Carol and her band Spookarama (named for Coney’s ramshackle spook house) are currently performing as a trio with Dred Scott on organ, accordion, piano and percussion (often simultaneously), and Jacob Lawson on electric violin and electronics. They have enjoyed a loyal and steadily growing following on the New York club scene performing at such venues as The Spiegeltent, P.S. 122, The Siren Festival, The Chapel at Green-Wood Cemetery, Joe’s Pub, Galapagos Art Space, Rockwood Music Hall, The Living Room, The Knitting Factory, The River to River Festival and The Brooklyn Lyceum.
They have four cds available on Mermaidalley Music (www.mermaidalley.com)
and 2 new ones in the works.
---------------------------------------www.Mermaidalley.com
New Lucid Culture
CD Review: Carol Lipnik – Cloud Girl
August 21, 2009
Every now and then something comes over the transom here that slipped under the radar when it first came out – or in the case of this album, predated this blog. This is one of the best of those – the cd cover image of the rails of the Cyclone rollercoaster with its “REMAIN SEATED” sign overhead is apt. Celebrated for her alternately soaring and piercing four-octave range, Carol Lipnik is also a uniquely gifted songwriter with a frequently sinister, otherwise amusingly carnivalesque edge. Lately she’s been pursuing what appears to be developing into an extraordinary collaboration with singer John Kelly (John Kelly and Carol Lipnik on the same stage – just think about the possibilities that conjures for a minute). For the uninitiated, this is Lipnik’s most recent album and comprises much of what she plays live. It’s a good an introduction to this indelibly New York, Coney Island born-and-bred artist.
The cd opens with Tom Ward’s noir cabaret waltz Freak House Blues, a playfully lurid tale bouncing along with horror-movie organ from keyboardist Dred Scott – a first-rate jazz composer in his own right – and violin by Jacob Lawson. The second cut, Lipnik’s own Falling/Floating mines the same kind of creepy noir pop vein that DollHouse or occasionally Blonde Redhead would pursue back about ten years ago.
Last Dance ( a co-write with Jane LeCroy) flirts with madness: “I can’t forget the last dance, because I’m dancing it still.” By contrast, another Lipnik original, Traveling is a lushly beautiful and sensually atmospheric. Then it’s back to the macabre with another waltz, Where Are You Going, examining the relationship between conformity and cannibalism as Lawson’s staccato violin screeches along on the beat. Atmospheric and echoey, the menace of Crushed is understated and effectively so: “Do you want me to stand on my knees for you?” Lipnik asks – but it’s obvious that she’s not offering. “I’ll be back, but I’ll be changed,” she warns on the soaring, crescendoing Mermaid Blues. Morir Sonando (a Spanish pun – it’s an orange milkshake) is a big bolero, pretty boisterous for a tribute to the delights of dreaming and sleep. The cd winds up with the haunting, hypnotic, somewhat Radiohead-inflected title track. For those who can’t get enough after all this, Lipnik’s just back from Yaddo and working on a new one. Carol Lipnik plays the Howl Festival, 8 PM on Sept 15 at the 45 Bleecker St. Theatre in the West Village.
http://lucidculture.wordpress.com/2009/08/21/cd-review-carol-lipnik-cloud-girl/
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Lucid Culture
Concert Review: Carol Lipnik and Spookarama at the Delancey, NYC 4/2/09
Yet another good reason why the weekly Small Beast Thursday shows at the Delancey are the musical event of the week...
...on the bill was Carol Lipnik, the extraordinary and unique noir chanteuse... Her voice awash in eerie reverb, Lipnik seemingly went into a trance, turning the loud, chatty crowd at the bar silent and riveted.
Backed by just her longtime keyboardist Scott (who also leads a spectacularly good jazz trio), she delivered a mix of both darkly familiar and new material, by turns phantasmagorical, carnivalesque, gleefully macabre and irresistibly compelling. With her red hair swaying behind her and the hint of a devious grin, Lipnik does not exactly look the part of someone who delights in mining the darkness, but that’s her home turf. She started out low, ominous and strong, at the bottom of her range with Scott playing a hypnotic, minimalist melody on a little synth organ he’d brought along. On the Tom Waits-ish Freak House Blues, she lept several octaves, seemingly to the top of her formidable four-octave range in a split-second as Scott played macabre major-on-minor behind her. When she sang “Take my life, please, take my will” as The Last Dance with You rose to a crescendo, it was impossible to look away. A couple of times - particularly on the darkest song of the night, the brand-new, literally morbid Cuckoo Bird - the two bedeviled the audience by stopping cold, mid-phrase. They also took the Michael Hurley cult classic Werewolf (also covered brilliantly by Sarah Mucho) and redid it as a swinging singalong before closing with a hypnotic, soulful retelling of the Rumi poemLove Dogs. Not to overstate the issue, but this is typical of what happens on Thursday nights at the Delancey. Next week’s show features another chanteuse, Larkin Grimm, whom Wallfisch insists is the next great voice to come along. Come out and find out for yourself. Or miss it at your peril.
http://lucidculture.wordpress.com/2009/04/03/concert-review-carol-lipnik-and-spookarama-at-the-delancey-nyc-4209/
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"Hungary has declared Marta Sebestyen a national treasure; Brooklyn should affirm Carol Lipnik's brilliance in a similar capacity."
- George Maida
The Electric Croude
WCVE-FM Richmond, VA
"Possesing the vocal prowess of a sufi, the purity of a girl folksinger, the power of soul divas plus a plain love of popcraft... Carol Lipnik might be the best vocalist we have in New York (or anywhere)."
-Richard Mortifoglio
MUZE.com
"Carol Lipnik’s Spookarama evokes a Coney Island of the ear, full of ghostly carnivalesque moments"
- The New York Times
"Carol Lipnik’s atmospheric, carnivalesque sound has won them a loyal following. If Coney Island had a cabaret scene, Lipnik would be its queen"
- Time Out New York
"Lipnik’s moody voice conveys the feeling of being stuck at midnight in the middle of the winter in Coney Island, the neighborhood of her youth."
- John Donohue
The New Yorker
"a soundtrack to a lost soul’s lonely stroll down a seedy New Orleans street, there lulled into a derelict brothel by Lipnik’s eerie multi-octave wail and Spookarama’s brand of blues, mixing voodoo and psychedelic. The music steers for melancholy by way of the carnival-esque and the creepy - no surprise, since Lipnik grew up by the defunct funhouses and rickety rides of Coney Island."
- The Village Voice
"Carol Lipnik sounds like Diamanda Galas fronting The Doors"
- Luna Cafe/ FuzzLogic.com
Carol Lipnik And Spookarama's Friend Space (Top 24)
Hello Carol, there are new tracks and videos online. Come and listen, please, and enjoy our videos! Let us know, if you like some. Greetings from Germany - Ines for Weltenreiter
Come and drink, and mingle, and support your fellow GLBT brothers and sisters... and hear some great music at the OUTmusic "Out Loud" Open Mic on May 4th. Signup at 7:30 at The Center 208 West 13th Street NYC
I overheard Dred Scott say you're going to win a Grammy...if anyone here's your new album. It is that good, I heard him say. I wanna hear it. Hope you have an excellent New Year.
