Corey Dargel

Corey Dargel's 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. Salon praises his songs’ “rococo ingenuity” and “sustained bursts of lyrical brilliance,” and according to Gramophone magazine, he has “a compositional sense guaranteed to keep close listeners on their toes. Words and music are truly equal partners....”

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 was hailed by the New York Times as "almost perversely pleasurable... pleases on almost every level... with an intelligent grace that is as moving as it is impressive..." Removable Parts has been nominated for three NY Innovative Theatre Awards -- Outstanding Performance Art Production, Outstanding Director (Emma Griffin), and 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.

Although he is best known as a composer and singer, Dargel also performs as an actor/dancer with the Brooklyn-based experimental theater company, Laboratory Theater, which he co-founded in the fall of 2001. Laboratory Theater’s work has been described as “ironic, weird, experimental, anti-dramatic, and compelling" (Village Voice) and “[i]nane, insane, mundane… esthetic purity under the guise of the absurd” (New York Press).

In addition to singing his own songs, Dargel 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.

Dargel 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.