A Musical Seance with Jill Tracy and Paul Mercer

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Just awarded the prestigious Best of the Bay 2008, our favorite noir chanteuse Jill Tracy returns home to Thrillpeddlers Hypnodrome for her latest incantation – “A Musical Seance”, an intimate collaboration with Atlanta cult composer/violinist Paul Mercer, and featuring master percussionist Randy Odell. These three special nights, Oct 9, 10 and 11, officially launch Thrillpeddlers “Shocktoberfest 2008, Elemental Horror” and are the only chance Bay Area audiences have to ring in the Halloween season with Miss Tracy, as she is venturing to New Orleans with The Malcontent Orchestra, performing for Anne Rices official Halloween Masquerade Ball!

Audience members are asked to bring small objects of special significance to them, such as a photo, talisman, jewelry, token.

Since joining forces on Halloween 2007, Jill Tracy and Paul Mercer are becoming widely known for their astonishing duets on piano and violin, mostly improvised or channeled. The pair affectionately refer to their duets as spontaneous musical combustion. Their uncanny ability to conjure spirits through unsettlingly lavish compositions has led to spellbinding results, eerily transporting the room and its rapt audience into a musical seance. Legendary scribe V. Vale of RE/Search publications described a Jill Tracy/Paul Mercer seance as “Sheer magic! Perfection. Improvised… If you’re lucky enough to be there, you realize you’ve just had a hint of something extra-mortal, uber-human, transcendent – maybe the concentrated ghosts of Shakespeare’s Globe Theater or the Commedia Dell’arte of the past are swirling around the room . . . and you think that THIS is the new avant-garde: live, un-censored, living theater.”

“These compositions are delicate and glorious living things they materialize, they transport, and in the same second they vanish,” explains Jill Tracy of the Musical Seance. “They embody the fragile essence of Time. No two shows are ever alike, we have no control, that is the rare beauty of it.”

Thrillpeddlers open the evening’s bill with Rob Keefe’s electrifying grand guignol comedy “A Slight Tingling” and the company’s notorious Blue Hour variety acts as part of this unique prelude to Thrillpeddlers ninth annual pageant of terror and titillation, “Shocktoberfest!! 2008- Elemental Horror” (playing October 16 – November 22).

The evening will also feature songs from Jill Tracy’s brand new release “The Bittersweet Constrain”, with her percussionist Randy Odell and guest musicians. “The Bittersweet Constrain” is Tracy’s fourth CD, and has been described as devastatingly beautiful. “Liar Society” hails it: “… a mesmerizing example of a musical endeavor that lives and breathes its own atmosphere…Jill Tracy is irresistible even in the face of the beckoning downward spiral. Though the record contains paeans to the barbarity of torture devices and other metaphoric references to the torments of love and lust, the raw emotional hunger of Tracy’s voice indicates that the agony of ‘the bittersweet constrain’ is, inevitably, all we have. But with music as compelling as this, it is a proposition difficult to argue against.”

Mercer, whose collection of ages-old violins each tells its own story the whispering in the wood– was the impetus for his highly regarded “Ghosts” CD and lecture series. “A Musical Seance” brings it one step further– harnessing the energy of the audience, a synergistic summoning of what dwells within each of us.