Carla Bozulich has traveled between 4 continents. She plays, composes and records as she goes.
Carla will perform at The Adelphi on Tuesday 20th September. The set will be mostly solo will include material from her classic take on the Willie Nelson classic ‘Red Headed Stranger.’ This means some awesome murder ballads!

The latest record album by Bozulich is Boy. The London Sunday Times had this to say:
“If Boy emerged from the oeuvre of a broadsheet-friendly icon such as Nick Cave, Patti Smith or Tom Waits it would be lauded as an uncompromising work of genius”.

She’s the leader of the band Evangelista, called “fierce, soul-ripping and strangely magnetic” by NME in their “Let Loose The Bats” Top 25. She is also the original force behind The Geraldine Fibbers and re-made Willie Nelson’s signature album, Red Headed Stranger, with Willie on 3 songs. She was a joint leader of Scarnella, Ethyl Meatplow and the Neon Veins. She has recorded 13 albums as leader or co-leader and producer. She is also a prolific writer of poetry and rants, and a collection of these works is forthcoming. She has begun a novel entitled The Sparkely Jewel which is a surrealist adventure story with a generous dose of auto-biography thrown in. To boot, she has recently produced the latest album for the killer Italian band, Blue Willa. She was also granted prestigious composer’s residencies at Montalvo Center for the Arts (2010) and CAMAC in Marnay, France (2014).

On August, 2009 she gave a rare performance as part of the 2009 Ruhrtriennale in Essen, Germany. Marrianne Faithful was the other featured guest. The program was orchestrated by Marc Ribot.

She’s created 7 editions of her sight-specific, multi-instrumentationist/pseudo-hallucinatory “Eyes For Ears”. Sponsors include the Getty Museum in Los Angeles (subtitled Fever Dreams) and the Krems Council of artists, (subtitled Skin Child) at the Donaufestival in Austria, at which she also co-curated 3 days of sound bringing together such visionaries as Laurie Anderson, Lydia Lunch, The Books, David Tibet and members of Godspeed You Black Emperor. Special site-specific compositions also debuted at the Walker Contemporary Arts Museum in Minneapolis and the Issue Project Room in Brooklyn, NY. These are unfolding, multi-stimulus experiences soon to get a name change. The series will continue as, Voyagers.

She has led a multitude of festival performances including All Tomorrow’s Parties, twice (UK and USA), Tanned Tin (Spain), 20 or so USA dates on Lollapalooza and dozens of other notable festivals including the Reading Festival (UK) and Pukkelpop (Belgium), the MADE Festival (Sweden) and Rumor (Netherlands). Italy, being a favorite haunt for Bozulich has yielded countless adventures. Some of the closest to her heart are: headlining the incredible Fabbrica Festival at Stazione Leopolda, playing Bari at the Timezones Festival, and especially being honored with a special stage built for her to perform in front of one of the world’s greatest ancient works of art, Toro Farnese, at the Museo Archeologico in Napoli.

Carla is noted not just for her own work but the incredibly high level of creativity and artistry her co-conspirators are known to bring forth. No matter who is playing it’s understood that the audience will be hearing the very best. Out of 100’s of collaborators here are some: Marianne Faithful, Marc Ribot, Beck, Thurston Moore, Lee Renaldo, Wilco, Christian Marclay, Xiu Xiu, Jenny Scheinman, Willie Nelson, Chris Corsano, Nels Cline, Noveller, Mike Watt, Carla Kihlstedt, Steve Shelley, Helios Creed, Damo Suzuki, G.W. Sok, Ches Smith, Lydia Lunch, Greg Cohen, Malcolm Mooney, Eddie Vedder, Marina Rosenfeld, Perry Farrel, Courtney Love, Massimo Pupillo, Shahzad Ismaily, Erika Anderson (EMA), Moby, Hadda Brooks, plus almost everyone from Godspeed You Black Emperor and Silver Mount Zion.

Bozulich performed on a night dedicated to the works of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill with the London Sinfonietta, plus a huge cast including Tilda Swinton, Sparks and Marc Almond at The Royal Festival Hall in London on Patti Smith’s Meltdown.

In an epic failure to explain a certain side of Carla, we offer some of her words relating to the Brecht and Weill concert: “I shared an ugly dressing room with one of my most beloved characters, Tilda Swinton. She was wearing semi-formal Armani menswear, impeccably tailored to her thin, 6 foot+ frame. Tilda drank champagne, I drank tonic. She got me into my crazy queen outfit. She talked a lot of shit—made me kinda puke with happiness. Honoring a timeless tradition, I threw a whole thing of hummus and carrots at the mirror to brighten up an already cheery mood and scare away the nerves. Then Tilda S. got out the shoes. She’d brought 6 pairs of festive, 5 or 6 inch high, swap-meet, cholita-style cha cha heels. She asked which would go best with her suit. I selected the red faux-alligator ones and went onstage. I was first. I sang the fastest, snottiest song Weill and Brecht ever wrote, “Ballad Of Lily Of Hell”. The London Sinfonietta raged the tempo behind me and when I almost got off the beat, they caught me with grace and candor. After my performance I was pulled into a room by a woman blindingly exotic. Juergen Teller was there in the ugly dressing room. He asked to photograph me while I removed my false eyelashes and suggested I slowly smudge off my makeup. This is all true, I fucking swear. But there’s something that doesn’t click at times because I get so blindly high from singing, so, though Juergen T. gave me his scrawled phone number I never found the time to ask for a print. Ha! I know… I do wish I had one. Patti Smith was how she always is when we meet…. not a perfect match there. But then as always she proceeded to surpass the last time I saw her do her thing, Patti Smith as Pirate Jenny. Yeah. Then the next night she performed the whole album, Horses, for the first time since forever. Nuff said.”

Carla’s credits include scores for a Los Angeles avant-garde production of Jean Genet’s The Maids, also a highly composed score to accompany the piece, “Sum”, written by novelist, David Eagleman. Her score for the award winning film, By Hook Or By Crook is bookended with a soundtrack compilation for which she brought onboard an incredible cast of friends, including The Makeup and Low, and she finagled a gritty blues composition out of Nels Cline designed to enhance a sweltering sex scene.

Bozulich condones “clawing your way out from underneath the band-aid doll skin stretched over our eyes and mouths”. Every project is sniffed with the lust of a primordial eater, asleep and dreaming to love and/or devour. She bites. Please feel free to touch her.

http://thequietus.com/articles/20762-carla-bozulich-speaks-on-rape-beyond-survival

Carla in the 90’s…