Joy Von Spain
Lady Lazarus
"Joy Von Spain makes some of the most menacingly beautiful music today, and deserves as much love (and press) as, say, Diamanda Galas, or Tom Waits or Carla Bozulich. Or even Gorecki..." - 9/10/09 - Mike Wood, Foxy Digitalis
"Joy Von Spain makes some of the most menacingly beautiful music today, and deserves as much love (and press) as, say, Diamanda Galas, or Tom Waits or Carla Bozulich. Or even Gorecki. “Lady Lazarus” makes us uneasy by easily mining the classical and the experimental to create gritty, fearlessly emotional music...
These are songs that wait in the dark for the right moment to attack themselves...'Lady Lazarus,' like its author, is genius. Difficult and harrowing, but honest and therefore holy, the songs of Joy Von Spain cant be forgotten if you tried, unless you exorcise them out of you." - Mike Wood, foxy digitalis 9/10/09
"Joy Von Spain combines avant-garde (de)compositional knowledge with noise...provocation, resulting in intriguing, often unsettling music that sounds like a dream/nightmare collaboration between Karlheinz Stockhausen and Coil, or Iannis Xenakis and Lustmord..." - Dave Segal, SLOG, The Stranger 12-22-08
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Regarding Joy Von Spain's first EP, Seeking Stockhausen's Moustache (Backwards Records NW, 2007)
"Highbrow neoclassical composition meets antagonistic noisician instincts in Joy Von Spain's compelling pieces. Her 2007 disc Seeking Stockhausen's Moustache comes shrouded in a bracing darkness and distinctive tonalities. It will one day be regarded as a classic in Northwest avant-garde music—if it isn't already. Her new work, Lady Lazarus, is going to flip some wigs and trigger some seizures, as well."
- DAVE SEGAL - The Stranger 1-7-09
"What might happen if cevin Key, Blixa Bargeld, and Phillip Glass were locked in a studio and told to produce a follow up album to Michael Gira's Body Haters, or a soundtrack to a sci-fi movie about a futuristic club on Saturn? ...it might sound something like Joy Von Spain's Seeking Stockhausen's Moustache."
- Chris Miner, Mind Altering Records Blog 4-28-09
Rock: Noise