Composer, singer, songwriter Corey Dargel is featured in the cover story of this month’s New Music Box.  Here he is in conversation with Frank J. Oteri, published April 01, 2012

All of Corey Dargel’s output could potentially appeal to an extremely broad audience, even his most outré experiments in empathy. At the same time, his seemingly simple early songs are filled with embedded complexities and reward with focused listening time and again. Like many other difficult to categorize music creators of his generation, Dargel consistently defies classification.

Video presentation by Molly Sheridan.

Read a transcript of the entire conversation at NewMusicBox:

]]> http://automaticheartbreak.com/2012/04/corey-dargel-the-challenges-of-empathy/feed/ 0 http://automaticheartbreak.com/2011/12/someone-will-take-care-of-me/ http://automaticheartbreak.com/2011/12/someone-will-take-care-of-me/#comments Thu, 29 Dec 2011 07:05:01 +0000 admin http://automaticheartbreak.com/?p=573 Share/Bookmark

Corey Dargel is joined by the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), pianist Kathleen Supové, and drummer David T. Little on the art-pop double-CD album Someone Will Take Care of Me. The album contains unconventional love songs from Dargel’s two acclaimed music-theater pieces about hypochondria and voluntary amputation — Thirteen Near-Death Experiences and Removable Parts. Dargel uses a mix of witty lyrics, humor and compassion to create quirky love songs that earnestly celebrate the ways in which abnormal behavior leads to more diverse interactions with the world, new approaches to creativity, and unconventional definitions of sanity.

Here are places to preview and purchase the album:

• New Amsterdam Records (physical CDs & high-quality Lossless download.  Ordering physical CDs gives you immediate access to downloads, but you can also purchase only the downloads.)
• The album is distributed by Naxos of America and is in stock at many record stores in the U.S.. Check with your local independent record store.
• Naxos Direct (physical CDs only)
• eMusic.com (download only)
• (download only, includes an exclusive bonus remix by Seth Gordon and an exclusive iTunes digital booklet)
• Amazon (physical CDs and mp3 download)

Here’s what the critics are saying:

Corey Dargel

June 28, 29, and 30, 2012
The Performing Garage, 33 Wooster St. New York, NY
Times and Ticket Prices TBA

photo © Paula Court

Laboratory Theater’s GIT ALONG LIL DOGGIES is a meditative, cowboy dance-drama about the spiritual imprint of the windswept landscape of the American west. In an impressionistic narrative drawn from a variety of sources, two outlaws on the trail of an old adversary take work as jewel thieves for a washed up brothel madam. In a chance encounter with a traveling magician, they locate their enemy and conjure the violent forces of nature through sex-magic to take revenge.

Directed by Yvan Greenberg, GIT ALONG LIL DOGGIES commingles elements of William S. Burroughs’ novel “The Place of Dead Roads”, with short stories by Annie Proulx, country-western line dance, and gay pornography. The performance unfolds against a projected video landscape of repainted Marlboro cigarette TV commercials and within an immersive soundscape incorporating country-western recordings from the 1920’s–30’s and contemporary new age music for pedal steel guitar.

Laboratory Theater’s signature layering of choreography, text, sound, improvisation, and imitation, provides a continuously shifting framework for a reconsideration of the outlaw, frontier spirit that continues to shape the mindsets of Americans in the 21st Century.

GIT ALONG LIL DOGGIES premiered at The Brick Theater in Williamsburg, Brooklyn NY, October 14–30, 2010. The piece was developed in part through in-progress performances at Dixon Place in February 2009.

“director-designer-choreographer Yvan Greenberg’s deceptive vision….affords some truly original moments…’Doggies’ is impressively immersive” —The L Magazine

Laboratory Theater “is cookin’ up some tasty stage grub…Yvan Greenberg, the feller stagin’ this show, adds in more fixins than a Louisiana roux…Corral up your friends and put some wild back in your west.” —AOL City’s Best

Corey’s ten favorite unreleased synth-pop songs, spanning topics from the Blessed Virgin to make-believe nostalgia and road-trip escapism, all remixed and remastered for this compilation.  Available exclusively through this site for $12 plus shipping.*

01. Saving the World
02. Play by the Rules
03. Divine Intervention
04. How Not to Say No
05. Don’t Let Me Lose Control of My Heart
06. Superhero on the Ground
07. Interstates
08. You Ten Years Ago
09. Until You Drown
10. I Am a Pine Cone

Listen to excerpts from all tracks:

all songs remixed and remastered
some songs re-recorded
Corey Dargel does words, music, vocals, all instruments, and production
©2001-2011 Automatic Heartbreak (ASCAP)

*Your order will be shipped via USPS standard first-class delivery (domestic and international) within one business day of your order. Delivery times vary from an estimated 2 to 7 days.

Corey was invited by the twice-yearly arts magazine, ESOPUS, to contribute an exclusive new song, “Mr. No Regrets,” for the magazine’s compilation CD, “Fear Itself,” included in Issue #17.  For this CD, each artist contributed an original song based on readers’ submissions about their idiosyncratic, irrational fears.  You can preview Issue #17 as well as tracks from the CD here.  ESOPUS is available via subscription as well as at select retail locations nationwide.

In advance of Corey’s November 9-10 performances in St. Paul, Classical Minnesota Public Radio broadcast an extended interview about Every Day Is the Same Day and Thirteen Near-Death Experiences as well as an exclusive live recording of “Your Discompassionate Arms” featuring Dargel on vocals and Todd Reynolds on violin and digital looping.

Listen to the interview and the live recording here.

The Twin Cities’ music journalist Claude Peck reviews Corey’s November 9th performance in the Star Tribune.  Full article here.

Steve Smith wrote a feature profile on Corey Dargel for the Sunday, May 1st, 2011, edition of the New York Times.  As a bonus, the online version of the article includes streaming and downloadable versions of Corey’s new EP Last Words from Texas.  Below is the text from the article, and here is a PDF of a scan of the newspaper.

A VOICE WHERE ROMANCE AND DYSFUNCTION MEET

by STEVE SMITH

“ARE you really going to ask me that?” the composer and vocalist Corey Dargel inquired near the end of a sprawling conversation one recent evening, his measured tone briefly betraying impatience and resignation. What bothered him was being asked how he felt about his constant characterization as an artist whose work concerns bridging the gap between classical and popular music. Though not inaccurate, the description has become convenient shorthand, warding off deeper investigation of his work.

“It’s not something I think about,” Mr. Dargel said. “When I sit down to write, I don’t think, ‘All right, I’m going to write a piece that’s 20 percent jazz and 40 percent indie rock,’ or ‘I’m going to write an indie-classical piece.’ I don’t even define my audience when I’m writing something.”

But the question, however esoteric, points to the way Mr. Dargel’s work has in turn been defined by audiences and critics alike. At the age of 33 he has built a profile as a writer of distinctive art songs that show his compositional ingenuity and his knack for pop-inspired directness, all delivered in his smooth, deadpan baritone. His lyrics, almost exclusively self-written, deal whimsically and sympathetically with romance, dysfunction and, often, their intersection.

“Corey writes catchy, sweet-sounding songs that contain hidden difficulties, both in their subjects and in the music itself,” the composer Judd Greenstein wrote in an e-mail. New Amsterdam Records, the influential new-music label Mr. Greenstein helped to found, has released two albums by Mr. Dargel. “His songs are like Trojan horses, using their surface charms to get past your emotional defenses, then delivering their subtle, nuanced messages on repeated listens,” Mr. Greenstein added.

Initially confined to downtown clubs and alternative spaces in New York, Mr. Dargel’s career has built serious momentum during recent seasons, and this month brings three high-profile engagements. On Tuesday Mr. Dargel will reprise selections from “Removable Parts,” a 2007 cycle, for a New York Festival of Song program assembled by the composer Phil Kline. “Say Yes,” a new group of songs, will have its premiere on May 11 during the MATA Festival. And on May 23 the string quartet Ethel will accompany Mr. Dargel in an ambitious recent work, “What Might Have Been,” during the Tribeca New Music Festival.

“I’m constantly worried that I might be boring, so I might bring that up every once in a while,” Mr. Dargel said, laughing gently, near the start of an interview at a restaurant in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, where he has lived almost exclusively since arriving in New York in 2001. He hardly needs to worry. Lean and wiry, with a cleanshaven head, a penetrating gaze and a placid smile, Mr. Dargel is arresting even before he speaks, let alone sings.

The child of musical parents in McAllen, Tex., a town chiefly notable for its proximity to Mexico and its exorbitant health-care costs, Mr. Dargel felt the creative urge from an early age. During childhood piano lessons, he said, he preferred to offer his own creations rather than laboriously practice music composed by others.

Epiphany turned up, against all odds, in a shopping-mall record store. “There were probably like 10 or 15 classical CDs in their classical music section, and one of them happened to be ‘Tehillim’ by Steve Reich,” Mr. Dargel said. “I don’t know why, but I picked that one up, I think because it had a photo of a living person on the cover, and not some work of art from the Romantic period. That was my first exposure to any music written after 1900, basically.”

Newly aware that composing could be a serious pursuit, Mr. Dargel enrolled at 17 in the Interlochen Arts Academy, a fine-arts boarding school in Michigan. But there was another, more pressing reason to leave home.

“One of the reasons that I left Texas was that I was gay, and there was no one out or openly gay at the time,” Mr. Dargel said. “My parents would not have accepted that I was gay, and in fact, when I came out to them, tried to get me to go to rehabilitation therapy. Before I came out to them, I left and went to Interlochen Arts Academy, because I thought that that would maybe be a place where I could meet other gay people.” (Mr. Dargel added that he now has a healthy relationship with his parents.)

After Interlochen he spent a year at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, then moved on to the Oberlin College Conservatory in Ohio to study with Pauline Oliveros and John Luther Adams. Mr. Dargel emphatically cited Mr. Adams as an enduring mentor.

“His and my music could not be more dissimilar,” Mr. Dargel said, “but he had a respect for what I was doing, as I did and still do for what he’s doing. He was able to meet me where I was and to get me to ask the right questions about what I wanted to do and what I was trying to do.”

Mr. Adams returned the admiration. “I worked with a lot of remarkable young musicians there, but he was certainly among the most remarkable I’ve ever worked with anywhere,” he said of Mr. Dargel, who was already mixing avant-garde impulses, Neo-Classical clarity and pop-music influences.

“In particular I think I heard the Smiths and Morrissey in what Corey was doing,” Mr. Adams said. “But I also thought I heard the troubadours and the trouvères.”

After graduating from Oberlin, Mr. Dargel moved to New York with his partner, Yvan Greenberg, a lapsed composer turned stage director and graphic designer. The move hastened a decisive shift in Mr. Dargel’s compositional trajectory.

“I knew I was moving to New York, I didn’t know a lot of people here, and I knew that I could sing,” he said. “I started to write lyrics that I felt somewhat confident about. I had the equipment to make and sing my own songs without having to rely on other musicians, and I just felt like that was a pragmatic thing to do.”

Mr. Dargel’s earliest New York songs, like “Accutane” and “Little Blue Pill,” sound like quirky, kinetic indie pop, with rubbery keyboards, chittering drum machines and darkly playful lyrics about physical infirmities. In time he used a laptop computer to fashion accompaniments that could sound paradoxically natural. (Asked what composing programs he uses, he wryly suggested “spyware.”)

More recently Mr. Dargel has focused on works meant for live collaboration, some involving elements of theater and dance. Kathleen Supové, a pianist of flamboyantly stagey inclinations, is integral to “Removable Parts,” a heartbreaking work inspired by people longing to become amputees. Mr. Dargel created “What Might Have Been,” a breezy meditation on nostalgia and its obsolescence, as part of a Brooklyn Philharmonic fellowship. The overtly homoerotic “Say Yes” he wrote to sing with the quartet Dither. “It’s me and four dudes playing electric guitars,” he said, emphasizing “dudes” in a manner suggesting an image as likely as spotting Mr. Dargel in a football scrimmage.

Mr. Dargel is writing for other voices now as well. He composed the epigrammatic “Last Words From Texas,” based on the statements of death-row prisoners, for Mellissa Hughes, a busy, versatile soprano. (He had also recorded the work himself.) And Ms. Hughes will play a role in “The Three Christs,” Mr. Dargel’s opera in progress about people with Messianic delusions.

A persistent inclination toward risky subjects, Mr. Dargel realizes, was shaped by his early feelings of doubt and isolation. “I really do almost always try to find a topic or subject that at first I find sort of off-putting or alienating, or at least difficult to relate to,” he said, “and then do enough research into it to where I empathize with people who are in these situations or have these conditions. And I try to find ways of letting audiences see how they’re connected to these characters.”

photo by Hiroyuki Ito for the New York Times

Thirteen Near-Death Experiences is an art-pop song cycle about hypochondria performed by Corey Dargel, with amplified chamber ensemble–an additional six performers on flute/alto flute/piccolo, clarinet/bass clarinet, piano, violin, cello and percussion/drum set.  It comprises the first CD of Dargel’s critically acclaimed double-album Someone Will Take Care of Me.

“Dargel spins quirky, lyrical tales of dysfunction and delusion… Imagine Franz Schubert composing a song cycle about hypochondria after listening to AM radio Top 40 and studying Thelonius Monk…” -eMusic Editor’s Pick, review by John Schaefer

“…wryly witty and often hilarious, crafted with a charming, angular lyricism, the deft lyrics recalling the best work of Warren Zevon and Randy Newman… What lifts these songs from merely comic throwaways is their graceful charm, mixing a lyric delicacy with an unsettled rhythmic line that reflects the hypochondriac’s nervous tension… Dargel’s scoring for sextet shows great skill and ingenuity.” - Chicago Classical Review

“These songs are peopled by twelve-year-old alcoholics; a Ritalin-stunted child who feels no emotions… I saw [Corey Dargel] perform selections from this album the other night, and was impressed with the balancing act he pulled off; he was playful, but never tipped completely over into mean-spiritedness; he was empathetic, but not manipulative; he made people uncomfortable, but didn’t seem interested in empty provocation.” -Jayson Greene at 17dots

New York Times review of the premiere performance featuring Dargel performing with the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) and David T. Little (drums) at Performance Space 122.

Thirteen Near-Death Experiences can be presented by itself as a short concert (approx. 50 minutes). For a longer concert, it can be paired with any of Corey Dargel’s other projects.

Photos from the premiere performance: