Marla Hansen, Makeshift Ego, Eric Ziegenhagen
Art in the cafe...
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Friday, June 30, 2006
Marla Hansen is a Madison native who currently lives in New York City. A classically trained violist who has branched out into popular music, she performs her own original songs accompanied by guitar-style viola. Her music is quiet and eclectic, with the mellow tone of the viola providing a refreshing new texture to the singer-songwriter format. Blending indie/folk style song writing with an alternately pure and wild voice, Marla's performances are intimate, vibrant and always surprising.
Marla is the violist for My Brightest Diamond
(formerly AwRY,) and has collaborated with Sufjan Stevens, Oneida, Kanye West and many other wonderful people while living in New York.
Makeshift Ego band members Kari and Shane combine their own unique musical styles to create an original and mysterious sound. They write subtle, yet thought-provoking lyrics and use uncommon chord combinations and rhythms that define their sound as a little dark with a quirky edge.
Playwright, folksinger, humdinger. Eric Ziegenhagen has been performing his spare, offbeat original songs in small clubs, coffeehouses and cabarets since the late 1990s. He is self-releasing his first CD, "You're Talking to the Wrong Guy" in January 2005. The CD was recorded in 2004 in one marathon session by Dan Dietrich (The Redwalls, Head of Femur) at Wall to Wall Recording in Chicago and features Elizabeth Lindau (of Canasta) on violin.
On stage, he's a casual and conversational fellow with opaque songs, treading the warm and weird ground between Jonathan Richman and David Lynch - working in the tradition of hard-to-pin-down individual artists like Leonard Cohen, Robyn Hitchcock, Vic Chestnutt, and Mary Margaret O'Hara (all big influences).
A noted playwright and stage director, Eric was singled out by American Theatre magazine (the Rolling Stone of the theater world) in 1999 as one of 15 up-and-coming U.S. theater artists under 30. Born in Minneapolis in August 1970, he has lived in Chicago since 1997.
Writes songs, plays them on a four-string nylon-string open-tuned guitar slung flat across his lap. The story: Eric's dad owned a guitar when Eric was growing up. Papa Ziegenhagen would let little Eric play the guitar as long as he kept it in the guitar case, and so he learned how to play that way.
