Reading with Rusty Rebar (music by Madeline Tasquin)
Channel: Nomadic Press
Date: 23/03/2015

Rusty Rebar served up a night of poetic justice at our Nomadic Press Oakland Workspace on March 7, 2015. Sides of musical magnificence were offered by the ever-so-talented, Madeline Tasquin. 
Rusty Rebar began writing poetry during high school, where he was also ordered to write for the school newspaper, which led to a degree in journalism, and eventually to the founding the Lassen County Times, a weekly newspaper in far Northern California, where to this day, his name is mud. He helps with the Petaluma Poetry Walk, organized the Marin Poetry Festival, Sunset By the Bay reading series in Sausalito, and is currently a non-card-carrying member of the Revolutionary Poets Brigade. For food, he codes obsolete database applications and tries to be nice to his wife. He has self-published lots of chapbooks. His work appears in a few anthologies and web journals.

Singing in both English and French, Canadian-Californian Madeline Tasquin’s songs dip from jazz-tinged folk to odd-meter soul, to twisted pop ballad and delicately dark fairy-tale. Raised in Northern British Columbia by her opera singer mother and Austrian gold-miner father, Tasquin began playing the piano as soon as she could reach the keys and developed an acute sense of melody and harmony by singing on long car trips with her mother and two younger sisters. In her teenagehood, Primus and Mr.Bungle played on repeat alongside Rachmaninoff, Satie, and Chopin. She returned to her musical roots through an unexpected relocation to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2006, after completing a degree in Architecture in Sydney Australia.

Since the 2012 release of her EP, Another Trip Around the Sun, Madeline has spent her time developing and touring a repertoire that leans closer to soul and blues than the orchestral-pop flavor of her debut recording. In “The Acorn and the Oak,” a romantically wandering melody reminiscent of a Chopin nocturne is woven through a driving blues ballad in compound meter.  In “Twinkle Twinkle Little Satellite” she quotes the familiar nursery song melody and then corrupts it in chromatic fashion, resolving into a doo-wop anthem about relativity. The thread that ultimately weaves it all together is a nimble 3-octave voice that adapts gracefully to the musical whims, and her disarmingly big, bold and heart-driven stage presence.

http://manamaddy.bandcamp.com/album/another-trip-around-the-sun-2012-ep