In an ex-industrial Brooklyn loft strewn with guitars and all manner of odd instruments, Kelli Rudick creates beautifully crafted and intensely driven compositions. Born in the states but raised in Israel, she spent endless hours playing in the echoing sound of the bomb shelter just outside the family’s house on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. After fulfilling her mandatory military service, Kelli moved back to the US and worked to create alternate playing styles through inventive fingerwork and variant tunings, creating a unique and inimitable musical style. In Brooklyn Kelli continued to develop her unusually powerful and expressive techniques. Using every timbre the instrument has to offer by slapping, tapping, bending, restringing and de-tuning, she causes the instrument to morph and transcend possibility in her hands.
In 2007 Kelli released ‘No One Knows You’re Foreign’, a distinctive work introducing her unique way of accentuating emotionally complex compositions by drawing percussive rhythms from the fretboard and body of the guitar while coaxing chordal melodies and harmonics from the strings. The cumulative effect of this soundscape reveals transcendently beautiful dimensions in an anomolous approach to guitarwork. Live shows in support of this record include intricately crafted arrangements for solo guitar as well as looping beats, bass lines and string driven sound progressions, creating captivating atmospheres though multi-layered melodic structures.
Kelli Rudick has collaborated with notable artists including Nick Zammuto of the aleatoric electro-folk duo The Books, Alon Leventon of the project Drops of Conciousness and the electro-indie group Zigmat, and recorded and toured with internationally acclaimed guitarist Kaki King. She’s scored music for Queer Eye For The Straight Girl, Showtime’s hit series ‘The L Word’, and the independent films ‘A Night in the Sunlight’ and ‘Absolutely I Do’. Kelli has toured throughout the United States and Europe, and has played extensively in her adopted hometown including shows on the main stage of The Knitting Factory, Galapagos, the Cutting Room, a month-long residency at the Living Room, and fronting her seven piece band at the Blue Note in New York City. Kelli has just returned to Brooklyn from a West coast tour and will add East coast dates soon.
The approaching winter finds Kelli recording for her upcoming 2nd release, which adds new dimensions to her work and is a definitive evolution from her earlier record. Accelerating the delicately complex terrain of her first recording, the new compositions add precise string arrangements, driving basslines, steely layers of variant guitars, mbira, nail violin, and rousing drums to her distinctive chordal compositions. Kelli will continue playing the new material as well as works from her first album solo and with her band. Please visit www.myspace.com/kellirudick for updates, tour info and previews of Kelli’s music.
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