about
TARA JANE ONEIL
Tara Jane ONeil is a multi-instrumentalist, composer, producer and visual artist. She creates melodic and experimental music under her own name and in collaboration with her brilliant friends. Her recordings and live performances range from solo songing to noise improvisations. TJO has composed and performed music and sound for films, theater and dance performances, and written large and small ensemble experimental architectures.
As a solo artist, TJO has released 7 full lenth albums internationally. She founded the Ecstatic Tambourine Orchestra and has played with the likes of Papa M, Mount Eerie, Ida, Mirah, Michael Hurley, Lori Goldston, Jackie-O Motherfucker, and the King Cobra. In the last century TJO was a member of art-punk band Rodan, the chamber music jam band The Sonora Pine and many others. She has made experimental scores to films by Makino Takashi, Vanessa Renwick , Linas Phillips and Theo Angell. Collaborating with Rachel Carns and Anna Joy Springer, she produced the music for Springer’s fabulist novel, the Vicious Red Relic, Love (jaded Ibis Press). She scored the experimental theater piece, at the Vanishin Point, by Naomi Iizuka for the Humana Festival of New American Plays. In addition to art galleries, DIY spaces and rock clubs around the US, Japan and Europe, TJO has performed at All Tomorrow’s Parties (invited by the Dirty Three), Primavera Sound, REDCAT, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Andy Warhol Museum, High Desert Test Sites, and the TBA festival in Portland, Or. In 2011 she released an album of improvisational collage with Japanese vocalist, Nikaido Kazumi.
In early 2012 TJO will perform as part of the PST festival in Los Angeles, and will program and perform at the Centre Pompidou- Paris and Metz.
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(LONG FORM MUSIC BIO)
Multi-instrumentalist, composer and producer Tara Jane ONeil creates melodic and experimental music under her own name and in collaboration with other artists, musicians, and filmmakers. Her work innately crosses genres and boundaries—drawings that morph from natural forms to linear abstractions, melodic songcraft melded with experimental noise; live performances that range from solo songing to large ensemble improvisation; and dance, film and theater scores-each telling the story in a dialect all their own. Though they spring from the same source, each piece takes a distinct form—several genies emerging from a single lamp.
Her musical life started at the age of 19 as the bass player for the influential and short lived art-punk ensemble Rodan in her hometown of Louisville, Kentucky. During the 1990’s, ONeil played in the duo Retsin, non-epic chamber rock band the Sonora Pine, and collaborated with many other groups. In New York City, she recorded her first solo album, Peregrine, in the bathtub of her Ludlow Street apartment; its 2000 release on Quarterstick Records marked the start of a series of increasingly complex and beautiful solo releases, most recently A Ways Away ( K records 2010).
She has lived in the Pacific Northwest since 2003. While writing her own music, ONeil has also collaborated with Papa M, Mount Eerie, Ida, Mirah, Michael Hurley, Jackie-O Motherfucker, and the King Cobra, among others; she founded the Ecstatic Tambourine Orchestra. She has scored soundtracks for film and theater; and composed experimental performances for large ensembles. ONeil is also an accomplished visual artist whose paintings and drawings have exhibited worldwide, and appeared on several record covers and in numerous publications; three books of her artwork have been published, Who Takes A Feather (Map Press, Japan, 2003), Wings. Strings. Meridians: A Blighted Bestiary (Yeti, 2007.), and Pluto Square Pluto (Publication Studio 2011).
TJO’s collaboration with Japanese vocalist, Nikaido Kazumi was released May 2011 on K records and Sweet Dreams in Japan. Her collaboration with Rachel Carns and Anna Joy Springer for Springer’s book the Vicious Red Relic, Love (jaded ibis press) was released and performed live as Your Guide to the Metaforests.
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