Murder Music: An Evening of Songs About Killing January 28, 2012

Featuring:

Phil Krohnengold, Sara Lov, Vivek Maddala, David Poe, Amy Raasch, Dudley Saunders, David Serby, Edward Tree, Carla Werner, Brian Wright.



Murder ballads were the original horror movies: they gave form to our terror and our rage and hatred, and purged them before we might be tempted to really act them out. They let us walk in the devil's footsteps without risking going to hell.
But in our psychologized era, what does murder mean to us? Is it still mythic? Has it become simply sordid, flat criminality? Or has it become somehow bigger, the murder extending beyond the edges of a knife?

In the MURDER MUSIC evening, then, 10 emotionally-investigative songwriters will try to excavate the ancient horror with a modern eye. Some will utilize a classic format, some will have a decidedly post-modern take. And the genres will range from Americana to pop to blues to the experimental. But by the end, we hope to have a compelling window into the modern American Heart of Darkness.
And to keep our minds from drifting into the strictly metaphorical, video artists Gray and Carpentier will project interstitial images of actual Los Angeles Crime scene photos on a stage backdrop, along with additional imagery created to amplify and illustrate each of the artists murder ballads.