Terami Hirsch

Singer-songwriter Terami Hirsch believes in embracing the imaginary. Hirsch's literate alternative pop music combines low-fi electronics with haunting piano melodies. Decisively departing from the standard collaborative model of album creation, Hirsch's artistic process is solitary and searching. Described as "cerebral theater" by Indie Music, with songs that Collected Sounds calls both "beautiful and eerie," Hirsch's music is complex, vibrant, and intimate.

Says Hirsch, "With each album, I try to transport my listeners to an unexpected musical world created by the intersection of sound and language."

A Los Angeles native, Terami Hirsch began taking piano lessons at the age of five. "I remember sitting at the enormous grand piano in our living room, and feeling a profound sense of wonder and escape." As a student of classical music, Hirsch is drawn to the mathematics of Baroque composition, but moved by the aching beauty of Chopin's nocturnes. Hirsch acquires additional inspiration from contemporary artists such as Kate Bush, Paul Simon, and Andrew Lloyd Weber.

In addition to formal music training, Hirsch attended Art Center College of Design, graduating with an emphasis in cinematography. Hirsch studied a wide variety of artistic disciplines: acting in independent films, writing poetry, pursuing experimental photography, and starting her own web-design business. Perhaps because of these interests, Hirsch also acknowledges the films of Jean Cocteau, the surrealist photographs of Man Ray, collages by Picasso, and the poetry of Jack Gilbert as additional influences upon her music. But more importantly, Hirsch's multi-disciplinary knowledge gave her the creative and technical tools necessary to control the entire process of album creation from composition and production to cover art.

Despite Hirsch's classical and technical fluency, it wasn't until she took time off to live in Ireland that she found the courage and inspiration to begin her career as an independent artist. Arriving during the rainy season, Hirsch found herself composing music on leaning, upright pianos in hotel lobbies throughout western Ireland. Hirsch's lonely experience as a foreign traveler in a lush, folkloric landscape inspired her to scribble lyrical fragments in journals and scraps of paper. When she returned home to Los Angeles, Hirsch compiled and translated those musical impressions, recording her first album, All Girl Band (1999), on a rainy, three-day weekend. She followed up her musical debut with a more rhythmic, electronic album, To The Bone, in 2002.

Her third album, Entropy 29, was released in November of 2005. Exclusively authored, recorded, produced, and programmed by Hirsch, Entropy 29 is an impressive testimony to Hirsch's disciplined and musically intensive approach to autonomous album creation. Ever questing after the ethereal and the elusive, Hirsch's third project is an exploration on time-travel. "I've always been convinced that time travel is possible," says Hirsch, "but not in the way that H.G. Wells imagined it. To me time travel is a connection of moments, skipping from one to another, consciously connected, but not exactly linear." The precisely crafted songs on Entropy 29 are arranged around expressive, bitter-sweet piano melodies with lyrics that conjure up darkly botanical, imaginary landscapes. Entropy 29 is a haunting meditation on memory and longing from a provocative and insightful independent artist.