southern records

Karla Schickele is a songwriter and a damn good singer. She wrote songs as the bass player of Beekeeper, she writes them as a member of Ida, and now she's written some for her first solo project, called k. The first k full length record will come out on Tiger Style Records in early summer with a wide rande of songs from odd ballads to Velvet Underground-style slow hurricanes. If you like such Karla-penned Ida classics as "This Water" and "Man in Mind", you'll love this record.

Karla was a founding member of the band Beekeeper with her brother Matthew Schickele and they released a 7 inch, an EP (Anywhere Will Do, Muss My Hair Records) and a full-length Ostrich (Southern Records, 1998). Beekeeper received critical acclaim and high praise from musicians as a ground-breaking band that harnessed the beauty and dissonance and strange meters, holding hands with both pop and art.

Karla joined Ida in 1996 as the temp bass player and stuck around, becoming a contributing songwriter and picking up some chops as a piano player. Karla has received approval from Ida fans for adding a beautiful alto voice to the winning vocal duo of Liz Mitchell and Dan Littleton.

Karla's new project is a solo venture - Karla writes and arranges, and does almost all the singing in k - but it's very much a collaboration, with a full roster of friends pitching in. The debut album includes the generous and masterful involvement of Tara Jane O'Neil (Retsin, Sonora Pine), who recorded many of the tracks on the album, and played drums on a few songs, Ida bandmates Dan Littleton and Liz Mitchell, Rose Thomson (Babe the Blue Ox), and many other great New York Musicians.