Bonfire Madigan Press Kit

Thai Food Music (review)
by Susan Glen - PopMatters Music Critic

Vocalist and songwriter Madigan Shive is a powerhouse in her own world, and Bonfire Madigan's latest release, Saddle the Bridge, sets out to prove Shive's masterful dominance, just in case there were any doubters hanging on after BMad's debut, ...from the Burnpile. On an album dominated by Shive's virtuoso cello performance and the perfectly balanced percussion work of Tomas Palermo, Saddle the Bridge is at once subtle and intense, soft-spoken and gut-wrenching. It invokes the wailing power of Sinead O'Connor at her best, and the lyrical delivery of the brilliant Kinnie Starr. Bonfire Madigan has a musical sound that is raw and powerful while kicking the guts out of any listener who gives more than a casual ear to the lyrics. And in the middle of all this, it manages to be truly unique and utterly superb.

Shive's real strength is in her melodies. Songs soar at the most inopportune moments, exactly when the well-trained musical ear expects them to go precisely where they don't. It's a bit of work, listening to this album. The harmonies are rich without stifling the thick and mature musical palimpsests giving birth to themselves as the songs progress, moving through all the usual places as well as the unexpected moments of downright sublime transendence. This isn't an album meant to be background music; to really appreciate the beauty and rage in Saddle the Bridge requires an active listening, and an open receptacle for the mental fallout that often accompanies such a masterpiece of music and voice. But it's worth every effort required, with spare change left over.

In fact, Shive has a truly unique control over her vocal performance, recreating the term "Diva" and staking her claim with the likes of PJ Harvey, Johnette Napolitano, and even Linda Perry. She often sounds like some anemic Siren as she wails, on the opening "Mad Skywriting (Rachel Ruth's Song)": "Here now ˜ hear this now / I am not sorry for being here now," a fiercely unapologetic anthem that sets up the rest of the album as a dialog of anger and frustration meeting the absolute glory of serenity. She manages to meld the subtlety of emotion with the absolute force of will that accompanies a purity of voice and harmony. In other words, Bonfire Madigan is what would happen if Enya was Tai food. Not since The Geraldine Fibbers has a string instrument been put to such fierce and intelligent use as in tracks like "Where the Sky Below Meets the Sea Above," "Running," and "The Debut and Debauchery of Anna Magdalena," the latter of which contains a Lucille Clifton poem that somehow manages to be haunting instead of pretentious. Fiona Apple could take some lessons from Bonfire Madigan, as could most of the post-Courtney Love female vocalists out there trying so desperately to sound tough and smart at the same time. Shive rarely screams out ˜ she doesn't have to ˜ but it's never hard to hear the spit boiling in her throat, and her brilliant use of the cello only serves to emphasize her balanced attack on those around her, and herself.

While there are a few moments of misguided but well-intentioned cacophony here ("Rachel's Song," with its radio dial samples, makes its point well enough without ever being truly listenable), and perhaps a slightly self-indulgent tinge to much of the second half of Saddle the Bridge, it is, nevertheless, one of the stand-out releases of the last six months. While surface comparisons abound, Bonfire Madigan is truly in a league of their own. Infusing a perfect meld of poetry and deliberate rawness, blending some of the finest musicianship to ever come out of Kill Rock Stars and the gorgeous and haunting lyrics of a master, Saddle the Bridge is poised to raise the bar for everyone from Charming Hostess to Tori Amos. The only question that remains is who will raise it for Bonfire Madigan.

"Saddle the Bridge" Bonfire Madigan are a trio composed of cello, percussion, and stand-up bass. This might make you think classic conservative party, but you'd be wrong. Singer-composer-vocalist Madigan Shive is Bessie Smith reincarnated as a punk rock cellist, as progressive and liberal as they come. Her powerful voice conveys irresistable emotion and her music creates a new language that is as ancient as the oldest Indian medicine woman and as modern as intergalactic space travel.
- Tricia Halloran Artistdirect.com & KCRW specialty show "Brave New World" 6/29/00

from the San Francisco Bay Guardian June 14, 2000

Bonfire Madigan Burning down the house

Madigan Shive is the Bruce Springsteen of chamber punk; she's the focal point, the man, the boss. As she bows the cello between her legs, sparks emanate from the top of her head. Her body snaps hard to the right and back to the microphone as words pour out of her like white water. The 24-year-old veteran of the Northwest punk scene moved to town last year as leader of Bonfire Madigan, the unlikeliest of power trios: cello, contrabass, drum kit. Shive has been curating a bimonthly event of "new" music at Cafe du Nord. On a recent evening Bonfire Madigan played a special record-release set amid the adoration of the already converted. The band cut a stunning swath: Shive shimmered in Cleopatra gold, and bassist Sheri Ozeki stood regal in a flowing red-and-white robe. Only drummer Tomas Palermo blended inconspicuously into the blue stage lights. Focusing on material from their brand-new CD, Saddle the Bridge (Kill Rock Stars), they performed a classical-pop hybrid that was scratchy, disturbing, and beautiful.

"Mad Skywriting" had a funky walk-up bass and a chromatic cello progression. Even as Shive drove the song to its fervent climax ("Existence should have been enough / To be loved"), her musical precision was flawless. Guest violinist Christine Lehmann completed the gorgeous dark chordings behind the mythic-folk ballad "Running," as Shive converted anger to mercy: "It's her lies / That's how we know she's all right." At other times she ran Copland-esque passages into classical Chinese into Patti Smith. Most sad and lovely, she held her cello to her lap as if to avoid being swept away by tragic love on the refrain of "Scraps": "Build your house from scraps / Make a home out of laughs." (Adam Savetsky)

Psst! Want some cool cello music to go with your punk rock records? Try Bonfire Madigan's Saddle the Bridge. It's innovative, minimalist orchestral pop. The trio consists of cellist Madigan Shive, bassist Sheri Ozeki and drummer/percussionist Tomas Palermo. This simple, unorthodox line-up results in some powerful and haunting fare. Take the track "Running", where the pulsing music is the perfect accompaniment for the brooding, somewhat mystical lyrics. Furthermore I haven't heard anything this strikingly "classical" since the first Rasputina album. In fact I was immediately struck by the long bowed tones at the beginning of the track. They remind me of some bit of a lost Shostakovich string quartet
-- Splendid E Zine

from the Worcester Phoenix June 4-11, 1999

String queens Bonfire Madigan rise from the Burnpile by Laura Kiritsy

It's the stuff of Hollywood legend: Grrl with cello meets Grrl with contrabass in a Los Angeles coffeehouse. Kathleen, the wonderfully pushy owner of the joint, insists they perform together at her shop. Sparks fly, igniting the musical inferno known as Bonfire Madigan, and our heroines ride into the hazy sunset with blazing bows to make mad passionate music forever. Okay, so it sounds like a Touched by an Angel episode, but we're talking LA here, folks. "Kathleen just came up to us and said, `When are you two playing here?'" laughs Madigan Shive, now based in San Francisco. "We'd never seen each other in our lives, and Sheri [Ozeki, contrabassist] looked at me and just said, `Umm . . . I don't know?' Kathleen said, `Well Madigan's a cellist and a vocalist and a composer, and Sheri you're this amazing upright bassist, when are you two gonna play here together?' She planted the seed and one thing led to another; and the next thing you know we were playing and recording and writing together, making plans to tour and it hasn't stopped. It's been very exciting." Bonfire Madigan, who appear this Saturday at the Space, are a mutating ensemble with Shive, Ozeki, and their strings. As the author and arranger of the band's emotionally charged concoctions, the 24-year-old Shive is clearly the breath and blood. With a rotating cast -- at times including DJ/percussionist Tomas, drummer Sunshine Haire, and slide guitar virtuoso Shelley Doty -- BMad's 1998 debut release . . . from the Burnpile (Kill Rock Stars/Villa Villakula) mixes loops, beats, and old-school punk riffs through Shive's elaborate string orchestrations, adding her primal vocals that instantly go from a breathy croon to an other-worldly banshee cry in a matter of notes. Inevitably her style has invited comparisons to PJ Harvey, the wild child of blues-infused punk. Shive has no qualms with that characterization. "I definitely feel aligned with PJ in the sense of completely having this vocal abandon; and I think maybe I share with her a real love of the blues and the roots of where rock-punk music comes from." On the flip side, the Bonfire Madigan sound has also been dubbed "experimental" by those who feel the need to categorize it. Shive finds this tag complimentary, well sort of. Like any self-respecting artist, she much prefers her sound not immediately invoke some sort of musical twin. "It has the ability to be more accessible than what we maybe have been manipulated to think experimental music sounds like, so I'm weary," she says. So it's no shocker when Shive, a huge music fan, reveals the legendary Nina Simone as a primary influence. An artist whose repertoire has included everything from Israeli folk songs to Gershwin ditties, Simone is the ultimate genre-defying performer. A lifetime lover of female vocalists and lyricists, Shive is most moved by women who have been willing to take risks to express their individuality, thus creating a unique presence on the musical landscape -- for example, Mecca Normal's eccentric vocalist Jean Smith. "She would go into the audience and wander around and sing, and I just thought that was the most punk thing I'd ever seen," she says. "It intimidated the hell out of people a lot more than the boys without their shirts on screaming into a microphone! That definitely was powerful." In the early 1990s, Shive and Jen Wood were the folkie-yet-hip acoustic duo known as Tattletale, who were rooted in their vocal harmonies with the cello as an occasional backdrop. It was not until the duo's 1995 demise that Shive put her DIY philosophy into high gear and took the plunge, composing rock music specifically for herself and her cello. A dedicated cellist since age nine, Shive says she learned to couple her instrument with her love for singing, which produced a magical combination. Surprisingly, she found "the cello is actually very close to a human voice, and in some ways it has become my ultimate singing partner. I can use it in so many ways -- at times it's a rhythm instrument for me and it's creating chord progressions, and at other times it's a completely lyrical second vocalist." . . . from the Burnpile's centerpiece, "Backseat Buoy" (previously released on a K Records 7"), a dramatic illustration of the intimate relationship Shive shares with her cello, is culled from her experiences growing up in a working-poor family in western Washington State. Supported by her auto-mechanic father, Shive always found cars to be a sort of safe-haven and a symbol of independence and freedom. On the canvas of a continuously swelling and churning C-chord cello stroke (giving the song a swampy-backwoods mood), Shive paints a chilling portrait of abduction and terror, the seedy side of car culture. When she warns, "There is a car outside waiting and on the inside/Outside nothing is quite what it seems. The trunk is full of broken dreams/Ripped out backseat schemes," one is all too aware that this is no Sunday drive in the country. Bandmates Ozeki and Tomas c ompleted the picture. "When they dropped this groove into the song and that became the road that the whole cello and all the sounds were able to travel on," Shive says. In its current incarnation Shive and Ozeki, who have performed together both nationally and internationally, are touring as the Bonfire Madigan String Duets. Playing a handful of dates on the East Coast, the duo are fine-tuning songs for their forthcoming album, which will also include percussionist Tomas. Adding more fuel to the Bonfire, the album will focus primarily on melding Shive and Ozeki's string collaborations into a contemporary acoustic rhythmic groove, swallowing up just about every musical style you can think of. "Having Sheri Ozeki as a part of this stew that I'm brewing away here has been the next definitive ingredient," Shive says of her co-conspirator, who has played the upright bass in the symphony and in jazz and rock groups. "Her rapport with it is so infinite that the way we can communicate is really exciting. It's going to be a lifetime partnership and journey because we've really found something that speaks in this unadulterated way I think, and hopefully without end." The tour will also spread the word on fellow Bay Area artist Marci Blackman (an accomplished writer and performance artist) who recently published Po Man's Child (Manic D Press), which is being promoted through MoonPuss, Shive's multi-media production outfit. When Blackman suggested that she and Ozeki join her on the tour, Shive says she felt it was a perfect match. "Marci Blackman is really so dear to me, and I've been really blessed to have witnessed the birth of this novel, Po Man's Child. I just can't even express how strongly I feel about its importance, and I thought the opportunity to let anybody who cared about my music know about this work was going to be an honor for me. . . . The plight of the independent book and independent bookstores is totally aligned with the plight of the independent music scene."

http://www.worcesterphoenix.com/archive/music/99/06/04/BONFIRE_MADIGAN.html

Bonfire Madigan Burns Bright
By Rebecca Gould

If you haven't yet stumbled across San Fransico-based Bonfire Madigan's soothing cello and lullabic vocals, sprinkled with gut-hatched wailing, you are starving your soul of the most nourishing elixir the contemporary music scene has to offer.

Twenty-four-year-old Madigan Shive, a cellist with a mesmerizing, dynamic voice and a theatrical and hypnotic stage presence teams up with contrabassist Sheri Ozeki and percussionist Tomas to create a sound which is emotionally and lyrically provocative.

Their first full length album, "From the Burnpile," was released by Kill Rock Stars in 1998. Bonfire Madigan blends their unique sounds with various multimedia performers - DJs, film clips and even trapeze artists. The band is currently working on their new album, "Saddling the Bridge," which will be released this Spring.

Weekly: As a band, how do you describe yourselves?
Madigan: I think what we're doing is something like creating scenes of sound-scaped songs - new radio poetry for the commute, the club, the study, the bedroom, the film, the rally, the recital, the turntable, the coming century. I'm really interested in the way contemporary music hears the string section, rhythm and the female voice.
Tomas: Cello, contrabass and small drums magnifying the emotional dust of dream states.
Weekly: How did you first get involved in music and when?
M: Music has always been very important to me. My favorite thing to do as a young child was sit next to my Uncle Philip at the piano and sing. I started my first band around the same time, organizing the kids on my block to hit Tupperware or strum my little half size guitar simultaneously. We were called the 12th Street Band. By the time I was in my teens, I was writing songs with friends in high school. The most rewarding thing was to haul the cello out to the ocean with my pal KC and compose with the tide as our living and breathing metronome. It keeps perfect lunar time. Singing with a sunset and seagulls creates the most unbelievable kind of three part harmony.
Weekly: How, if at all, has identifying as queer affected your artwork?
M: I feel that in general, overly creative types tend to be queer people, or at least feel no inhibition in expressing a need to show society that queer relationships are as natural, valid and important to cultures as say inter-racial, inter-religious, inter-generational or inter-class relations are. Acknowledging my queerness publicly has affected my work as much as openly and artistically recognizing my sex, race, class background, etc.
Weekly: Give us a few words about the other BM band members.
M: Sheri and Tomas have become simply invaluable to me. It's the most unearthly thing to have people willing to write a new language with you and sing it back to strangers while you're developing a new vocabulary every moment. That's what musical collaborating is like. The fire is to me what plastic might have been to Yoko. They fuel the bonfire in this Bonfire Madigan band!
T: Sheri's an amazing producer and bass player, a natural musician with a wealth of creativity and a passion for fine roll-up tobacco. I spin records to stay sane and write letters and poems on a Sterling Corona manual typewriter. Weekly: What is the connection between you and your listener?
T: When I play, it's an experience within and "of the music." Music is actually comprised of the performer and the audience so we're playing with each other in unison.
M: There are times though when I sing or play cello for myself alone and it is a real catharsis and actually the best time for writing, but you learn everything about what you're trying to express by sharing it with someone else.
Weekly: What's the deal with your new album?
T: I'll let Madigan explain.
M: There are two main compositional pillars that I loosely call minimalistic symphonic trilogies, which are the album's conceptual anchors. But I think it can be summed up in a Bini proverb I recently came across which says "rivers ever remain small that do not stretch their fingers to the sea." I also see this next record as a bridge to the next one which has, for years, been more than half written. This would be the secret and infamous, (at least in mine and my cohorts' minds), "Covert Constellations."
Weekly: Where are you all planning to go from here?
M: I want to tour again in Europe in the spring with the new album as a trio. I love touring - bringing the music to converse with people. So there should be plenty of that in the future - including West Coast dates in late October.
T: We'll go where the Song will take us. Perhaps do some electronic-melancholic freeforms next. Dark blue indigo music.
M: Oh yes.
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Copyright © Aug 26, 1999 The Stanford Daily

B I O G R A P H Y - D E P A R T M E N T

Madigan composer- cellist- vocalist- performer

Based in San Francisco, Madigan Shive is a 25 year old career performer, active in composing and performing original materials for more than half her life. At the age of 16, she instigated Seattle's acclaimed acoustic duo, Tattle Tale and has since gone on to create an enormous discography, including CD, LP and EP releases of her own work, compilation tracks, vocal and cello contributions to film soundtracks, guest performances on many records and a strong international underground following that continues to grow exponentially. Her ensemble, Bonfire Madigan, whose debut CD ...from the Burnpile was released in 1998 on Kill Rock Stars & Villa Villakula Records, continues to chart on national community and college radio. The BMad project focuses on her collaborations with long time musical allies along the west coast, including contrabassist, Sheri Ozeki, drummer/ DJ, Tomas and guitarist, Shelley Doty. Their sophomore CD Saddle the Bridge has a street date release set for May 16, 2000 on KRS and is a definitive sonic step for the band. Having worked in a variety of styles and settings, Madigan is acutely aware of the context in which her work is being viewed and, therefore, always pushing the boundaries to redefine that context. She has introduced the cello to many as a contemporary instrument capable of expressing a multitude of emotions and moods. Look for her performing with the Bonfire Madigan band or solo throughout the year.

"Madigan Shive is a baroque folk-punk diva who loves clashing tone with mood. Her deep, strong voice is soulful when she's wrathful and sexy when she's standoffish. And she plays a mean cello to boot." - The Boston Phoenix

"As a live performer Shive is rousing theatrical in expression and movement... with a keen ability for poetic lyrics and a voice that pulls emotion right out of her belly." - New York Time Out

"Madigan creates operatically atmospheric arrangements featuring inventive cello playing and dramatic vocals." -The Seattle Weekly

Tomas (also of slug, Umoja)

Co-founder of Umoja Soundsystem, Tomas is a DJ known for eclectic sets of music that range from jazz through abstract beats to house and drum & bass. Based in LA for 7 years where he co-founded clubs such as Goa Dub and B-Side, Tomas has been back in the Bay Area for four years holding down gigs at La Belle Epoque, Solid, Eklektic, Hedquarters and too many others to name. Involved in making tracks under the names Live & Direkt and DubID, Tomas is also a consumate drummer and percussionist who incorporates this knowledge of rhythm into his sets. "The music I play has to be deep and different."

Sheri Ozeki

Bassist extrodinaire in all capacities. sound aficionado producer. engineer. has played in jazz, classical, persian, rock, electronic, big bands, among others. has been recording and touring with madigan since 1996. LA native - the real deal valley gal. invented the cheshire grin. f-hole tattoo is traced from her first love - her 200 year old contrabass.