Step right up and meet the astounding Zeena Parkins, the world's greatest electric harpist. Forget about angelic choirs; Zeena cites Jimi Hendrix as a major inspiration, and her harp work is similarly explosive, often blurring into fuzz-distorted terrain. Parkins is a lightning bolt of a performer, and a much sought after collaborator; she works frequently with Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo and Jim O'Rourke, and has recorded and toured with Courtney Love, Matmos, Yoko Ono and Bjork.
Recorded in 1992, Nightmare Alley was Zeena's first solo release and the first CD on Table of the Elements. A hypnotic classic, it lures the listener into a parallel world of sensations, one that is disorienting and surreal, strangely pleasurable and more than a little dangerous. Step inside if you dare - you won't believe your ears!
"Music that makes you hike up your britches and howl like a coyote. Parkins, one of the only avant-garde harpists around, uses both her acoustic and an electric harp complete with wah-wah (whammy) bar to dance the tarantella on the stuffy Harpo Marxist image her instrument has. She is not afraid of its natural beauty and sophistication but more often than not her hands are dirty to the elbows in discordant tangents, Hendrix distorto-feedback, and fierce multi-phonics . I love this, I love this, I love this."
WDC Period
"These pieces present Ms. Parkins' vision naked and undiluted, displaying a seemingly infinite array of auditory device, the music registering in the void like the peaks and valleys of a psychic EKG of subconscious fantasy."
Creative Loafing, Atlanta
"Effortlessly switching between serrated noise and controlled feedback outbursts to delicate extended harp improvisations, Zeena Parkins' solo performance is a stunning display of her extraordinary talents."
All Music Guide
"As the over-dubbed blips go careening off each other, stretching high, then shrinking low, it's easy to imagine that every type of music you've ever heard is in here somewhere."
San Francisco Bay Guardian
"Zeena Parkins is my favorite living harpist . the kucks of sonic gristle that she pulls from it are dandy as jack. A truely ginchy exploration of forgotten string potential."
Spin
"There's great fixity and coherence to the mini-essays she develops. In the end, it's classical NYC avant garde -- garrulous, multi-faceted, ironic and open."
The Wire
"Her style defeats categorazation, and is therefore all the more interesting."
New York Times
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