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 completed 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."

Bonfire Madigan appear at 8 p.m. on June 5 at the Space. Tickets are $6. Call 753-0017.