Marina Lazzara
poet/guitarist/singer-songwriter
Marina Lazzara was born and raised in Easton, Pennsylvania where the Lehigh River falls into the Delaware. After attending college, bartending and lying around the Atlantic shoreline for five years in Virginia, she moved to San Francisco and graduated from the New College of California with a Masters of Arts in Poetics and published a book of poems entitled The Backdrop Line. Her appreciation for music began as a toddler when her mother encouraged her and her sisters to sing in bed before falling asleep, and her two older sisters & cousins taught her guitar, drumming and songwriting. From there on, she spent most of her teenage years playing guitar and drums in a neighbor’s garage, talking about consciousness expansion and worshipping 70’s rock posters. She avoided structured ideas of “a band” in her twenties, seeing it as a great example of capitalistic personality exploitation. Instead, she opted to jam with friends and a bottle of whiskey in obscure practice places like a squatted converted boy’s bathroom. It wasn’t until her early thirties that she accepted “the band” as a true artistic experience, giving up the artsy poetry scene contaminated by narcissism and the creative activist scene contaminated with dogma. Although the indie-rock scene is diseased with trust fund brats, she found solace with some of her favorite working class musicians and joined, created, moved into her obsession with songwriting, head banging, and singing with angels. Besides ambitious endeavors toward a life of creativity, selfish social activism to enhance the urban imagination and endless schemes to dodge student loan payments, Marina now works with the homeless and studies Botany & Herbalism. She has been in various bands including the rotating idie-rock trio, Blue Gum Art as well as Liesl’s Wet Dress, the Abstractions, Smile God Loves You, This and Poetiks (www.poetiks.com). Currently, she plays rhythm guitar with the SF band, the Rabbles (www.myspace/therabbles.com), who will release a CD this summer on Aboriginal Records entitled RabbleRabble. Marina is finishing up a manuscript for a second book of poems and currently working on songs for a second solo project to be released this fall.
paxrecordings.com/Artists/Marina_Lazzara.html

POETIKS: Gypsy Thrift
Poetiks music is dark-pop with roots in folk songwriting. Moments of psychedelic display and simple rock motifs surround sing-songy lyrics with undertones of critical social dismay that's coated with lyrical idealism.
CD price: $12.97 / MP3 price: $8.97

VOICES IN THE WILDERNESS: Dissenting Soundscapes and Songs of G.W.'s America
STOP THE WAR. Created out of the anxiety & disillusionment of GW's reelection on 11/04. This CD of 26 artists transcends music genres & ideologies w/ the common purpose of dissent towards the Bush regime. END THE WAR IN IRAQ. Limited edition almost gone.
CD price: $8.97 / MP3 price: $8.97

MARINA LAZZARA: Wind On The Firecracker Of The Building Next Door, the songs
The songs on Wind... attempt to re-envision the symbolic plasticity of the pop-folk ballad and to dig into the spontaneous expression of song as nature. Noise folk... where the "experimental" meets the "song".
CD price: $12.97 / MP3 price: $8.97

THE ABSTRACTIONS: Novo Navigatio
2004 CD release of West Coast subtle, psychedelia-improv to experimental songs. sinking commentary on the disillusioned atmosphere of George W. Bush's America. "Sounds like Leonard Cohen deconstructed to some really nice abstract noise." --Vital Weekly
CD price: $8.97 / MP3 price: $8.97

LIESL'S WET DRESS: Shedding Skin
Hauntingly harmonic melodies entice you through the dark rock'n'roll carnival with a collage of brooding, moody vocals, psychedelic guitar riffs, seductively rhythmic bass lines and tauntingly soulful lyrics.
CD price: $10.00