Moira Cue

Moira Cue is unlike any one you've ever heard or seen before. She's got Star-power.

Her music is frequently compared to Bjork and Portisehead because of the distorted, edgy vocals and complex melodic layering. She is a performing artist, award-winning composer, lyricist, and artistic director, as well as a vocalist. Her vocals range from blusey, early Joplin-esque to light, jazzy, and sweet like Norah Jones, crisp and uptempo like Judy Garland or Diana Krall, or hauntingly melancholic like Niko.

Wearing skin-tight latex haute couture in Chicago's Artemisia Gallery, she sang while shooting marbles at the audience. Wearing a halter top made of peacock feathers in Chicago's Tantrum lounge, she devoted an evening of hip hop homage to the late Josephine Baker. Wearing a one-of a kind ensemble made of Chinese silk brocade and hand-embroidered gold dragons, she sang, "My mind is a jade jar of ice," at the legendary Empty Bottle.

Moira takes studio recording and production seriously. Her first two cds were entirely self-produced, using the melody of a Sprint PCS I Ching cellphone game, personal field recordings from a Zen temple, a Gospel choir, a gothic cathedreal, and a nightclub, along with hand-made, make-shift instruments. She experimented with aucoustic spaces, reverb, feedback, and stressing the natural limits of the mix board. She called the music "red," because "the little red lights were always going off." Her editing included breaking each song into nanoseconds. With her third cd, she worked with fragments of her original two cds, and discovered, altered, and amplified existing rhythmic structures with repetitive EQ on the 60 to 40 Hz range. The result was "Cue Dance Track," which is distributed by Chicago Indie label Terry Plumming Records sold online, and in select locations throughout the country.

Smashing Pumpkins front man, Billy Corgan, was so impressed with her sound that he wrote that she had "exceeded" his "highest hopes."