About
Thirteen Near-Death Experiences is a series of art-pop songs about different kinds of psychiatric delusions, with a specific focus on hypochondria. The songs are written by composer/singer Corey Dargel and performed by Dargel with the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE).*
When he was in junior high school, Corey became ill with a chronic medical condition that kept him in bed for the better part of six months. Doctors could not diagnose the condition. Eventually it went away on its own, but Corey was held back one year in school, and he never found out what was wrong with him.
In Corey’s music, psychiatric case studies masquerade as love songs, embracing a mix of humor, tenderness, and pathos, celebrating the ways in which abnormal behavior leads to more diverse ways of interacting with the world, new approaches to creativity, and unconventional definitions of sanity. Musically, Thirteen Near-Death Experiences represents a drastic shift for Dargel from his signature electro-pop sounds to the classical chamber ensemble.
This site chronicles the making of Thirteen Near-Death Experiences and gives anyone who’s interested the opportunity to observe and participate in its creation. There will be comments here from the musicians and other collaborators, from Corey’s friends, family, and colleagues, and from strangers who are interested in being part of this process.
The premiere performances of Thirteen Near-Death Experiences will take place in New York, NY, on Friday and Saturday, May 22 and 23, 2009, at Performance Space 122.
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Corey Dargel is a Texas-born, Brooklyn-based composer, writer, and singer. The New Yorker magazine calls him “a baroquely unclassifiable artist whose…ingenious nouveau art songs revel in the teasing triviality of pop but have enough classical discipline to keep them from going too far.” 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’s newest album, Other People’s Love Songs (2008, New Amsterdam Records), was recently profiled on NPR’s Weekend Edition. The New York Times calls the album “at once wistful and wry, tender and irreverent…. [G]iving voice to the lives and relationships of his subjects, [Dargel] invests melodies with playful melismatic turns, evoking Kurt Weill cabaret….” Jayson Greene of 17 Dots writes, “[Dargel] plays the role of a sardonic-hipster Cyrano, translating…tangled and intense feelings into artful, sophisticated pop songs.”
Removable Parts, Dargel’s music-theater piece about love and voluntary amputation (yes, voluntary amputation), won the 2007 New York Innovative Theatre Award for Outstanding Performance-Art Production and was hailed by the New York Times as “almost perversely pleasurable… with an intelligent grace that is as moving as it is impressive.” Removable Parts has been performed in Sarasota, Pittsburgh, Toronto, and New York and was remounted in 2009 as part of HERE Arts Center’s Culturemart festival and the Public Theater’s “Under the Radar” festival.
Dargel has performed on bills with Joanna Newsom, Final Fantasy (Owen Pallett), Grizzly Bear, Anti-Social Music, NOW Ensemble, Eve Beglarian, Phil Kline, Nico Muhly, William Brittelle, Margaret Lancaster, and the American Composers Orchestra. Although he is best known as a composer and singer, he also performs as an actor/dancer and founding member of the Brooklyn-based experimental theater company, Laboratory Theater. 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).
The International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), described recently in the New York Times as “one of the most adventurous and accomplished groups in new music” and by the New Yorker as “a powerhouse of new-music programming on a Chicago-New York axis…brilliant and unexpected” is a uniquely structured chamber music ensemble comprised of thirty dynamic and versatile young performers who are dedicated to advancing the music of our time. Through innovative programming, inter-disciplinary collaborations, commissions by young composers, and performances in nontraditional venues, ICE brings together new music and new audiences.
ICE was founded in 2001, and has rapidly established itself as one of the leading new-music ensembles of its generation, winning first prize in the 2005 Chamber Music America/ASCAP Awards, and performing over fifty concerts a year in the US and abroad. Recent engagements include performances at the Mostly Mozart Festival of Lincoln Center, the Bang on a Can Marathon at the World Financial Center, the opening ceremonies of the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, multiple engagements at Miller Theatre, and performances at international festivals in Europe, Asia and Latin America. ICE served as ensemble-in-residence at New York University from 2004-2008, and at Columbia College Chicago from 2003-2008.
The ensemble released its first critically acclaimed CD on the Naxos label in 2007, and has recently released a new album on the New York based indie New Focus Recordings label featuring works by Davidovsky, Linberg, Saariaho, Du Yun and Fujikura. ICE is also featured on a new release featuring works by George Crumb on the Complete Crumb Edition of Bridge Records, recorded under the supervision of the composer.
In addition to ICE’s performances at major venues throughout the world, the ensemble has self-produced eight contemporary music festivals in venues as wide-ranging as nightclubs, galleries and warehouses, many of which are free and open to the public. An interest in multimedia productions has led to collaborations with Ridge Theater, with the New York City ballet choreographer Christopher Wheeldon, with director Luca Vegetti on the US Premiere of Xenakis’ opera Oresteia, and with director Lydia Steier on the co-production of a touring version of Peter Maxwell Davies’ Eight Songs for a Mad King.
A champion of music by emerging composers, ICE has given over 400 world premieres to date. In 2004, ICE launched the 21st Century Young Composers Project, a worldwide call-for-entries by composers under the age of 35, which has culminated in the world premieres of works by young composers in 27 different countries.
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