Shelley Hirsch

Going as far back as her childhood, Hirsch relentlessly mines her life experiences, concocting brilliant collage-like reminiscences that are alternately, and sometimes simultaneously, disquieting and euphoric. Embracing archetypal personas such as Blanche Dubois, she weaves their reinvented essences into the maze of associations conjured by her alchemical compositions. Investigating immediate consciousness, memory consciousness, and image-making consciousness, she becomes a producer of sonic images, recycling the discarded and the strange. Her remarkably unfettered access to the motherlode of automatism enhances her gift of spontaneous ingenuity.

Hirsch's command of extended vocal techniques imparts enormous variety to her music. The tone of her voice can range from audacious vulnerability, to charismatic intimacy (especially in the story-telling segments), to hallucinatory excursions floating effortlessly out of the spoken/sung voice and into pure Hirschian singing. Such transitions always remain viscerally connected to the text and in context. (Anne LeBaron/ Garland Press)

Hirsch is an extraodinary vocalist... enormously, inventive, scathingly satiric and virtuosic... A brilliant overwhelming presence on stage. (Peter Watrous, New York Times)

... stunning, psychologically naked, haunting... wild beautiful energy... her dramatic stream of consciousness singing is as original as anything downtown. (Kyle Gann, Village Voice)

One moment she'll be chopping vegetables with an enormous cleaver and the next soaring over the audience on a swing. As entertaining as she is eclectic. Hirsch has the verve of a pop singer; Judy Garland possessed, Lotte Lenya tripping on some astral plane. (Vogue Magazine)

Vital humor, playful performance and fast changing surprises astounded the audience... musical and theatrical brilliance. (Berliner Tageszeitung)

Absolutely explosive... a sort of hybrid genre between stand up comedy and powerful vocal artistry. (L Union, Montreal)

A woman of a thousand voices... She offered an enthralling demonstration of the way songs, vocal styles and language might have evolved out of more primal musical impulses. (Stephen Holden, New York Times)

She is easily the most versatile, quick thinking and amusing singer of the new music. (Kevin Whitehead, Coda Magazine)

Shelley Hirsch's "O Little Town of East New York" answers the question "How did a nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn grow up to be one of our generations most outrageous vocal talents?" (VillageVoice, NYC)

A euphorically received performance. No one could copy this work. One would need a voice capable of constant transformation, an unlimited fantasy and masterful, anarchistic sense of culture that this artist shares with no one else. Speech, song, movement, pictures, fiction and truth are all there. (Abendzeitung,Nurnberg)

Major accolades go to Shelley Hirsch, the diva of 1000 voices The script is wonderfully impressionistic, wildly funny. (The Wire, London)

Hirsch sings the past to life, in a voice that can roller coaster from crystal cracking coloratura arias to the mush-mouthed bluster of a Brooklyn roughneck to the adenoidal yawp of a yenta. O Little Town is stuffed to the bursting with the frayed dreams, unspoken sorrows, and the kooky hilarity of the characters who peopled her neighborhood. (Mark Dery, New York Magazine)

Her wonderful autobiographical radio play The Vidzer Family is a brilliant and sensitive collage of the oral history of this family ." (web review/Blue Gene Tryranny)

In her performance "For Jerry" this all around artist honors her colleague Jerry Hunt, the composer and performance artist. The evening is a tremendously stimulating voyage through a magical universe of sounds, pictures and objects raising many questions about life and death. The audience is not seated in the auditorium but on a stage which resembles some kind of enchanted fairytale forest. Video monitors are transformed into bizarre blossoms, empty picture-frames become contemporary witnesses and simple house-hold items such as a souring pad, function as fascinating musical instruments... the spectator is bewitched and does not want to go back to reality." (PeC, Berliner Kurier)

...tremendously intense scenes... It is not possible to have brought Jerry Hunt his person, his work to the stage any better than this. One great evening. Two great artists. (Tagesspiegel Berlin)

Playful Seance- A funny, yet serious play in which the smallest nuance is perfectly balanced. An absurd, crazy One Woman Show combining music,theatre and installation. Shelley Hirsch in a wonderland between high tech and archaic ritual. (Robert Jungwirth, Associated Press)

"States" is incredible... (NY Press)

"States" is a pandemonium of resuscitated ghosts from the past, the present, and the future; an illustrious parade of characters; a vocal discourse between various impersonations of imaginary people; an associative stream of the subconscious where Shelley Hirsch's singing in tongues reformulates our own collective nightmares and hopes. (SuddeutscheZeitung)

A master of mind twisting imagery, irony and humor delivered with astounding physicality, the composer and vocalist performs one of her stream of consciousness masterpieces, States. The piece is assembled from a miasma of musical and environmental sources driven by a text that is both personal and universal, often shifting with the flick of an eyelash. (Roulette TV Web Review)

Hirsch's creative transformations of kitschy fragments and her skilled shaping of multiple dimensions suggest a quality central to the surrealist doctrine, the merveilleux: "a rupture in the order of reality." (Adamowicz 1998:11-12) Her methods go beyond conventional definitions of composition and of performance. By violating logical, linear narrative forms, by opposing elements from our known world in disturbing ways, she plunges herself, and her audience, into collective reminiscences so visceral that they seem almost visual---a surreal accomplishment in itself. (Anne Le Baron in her article Reflections on Surrealism in Postmodern Music - Garland Press)