Accordion Noir Festival headliner Miss Murgatroid finds her main squeeze

Miss Murgatroid’s Renaissance woman, Alicia J. Rose, tells the story of a chance meeting that led to her love of the accordion

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      We’ve all heard tales of how people have found purpose, inspiration, or even a new identity through some apparently random occurrence. But Alicia J. Rose’s overnight metamorphosis into proto-hipster sensation Miss Murgatroid is the only one we know that involves a chance meeting with a squeezebox.

      “It’s funny,” the animated musician, photographer, and filmmaker explains, reached at her Portland, Oregon, home. “I grew up in a really musical family, and along the way I tried to play a lot of different things but never connected with any of them. The piano, I liked: my grandmother played, and taught me, and I thought, ‘Well, this is interesting.’ But I didn’t really connect. Same with bass and guitar. I love to sing, but bass and guitar didn’t really do it for me. But after I left L.A., after high school, I moved to San Francisco, and I started working at this place called BrainWash. It was a café, laundromat, and music venue. And at one point this one act started playing and he had the most gorgeous accordion. I saw it and I was like, ‘That is so cool. It’s like a piano mixed with a pachinko machine. What the Jesus?’

      “I asked him if I could play it,” she continues, “and he said, ‘Sure. Just try it.’ I put it on, slipped my hand through the strap by the buttons, found middle C, pulled a note out, and I was like, ‘Okay. Now we’re talking! This is everything I want.’ ”

      It didn’t take long for Rose, who headlines next week’s genre-inclusive Accordion Noir Festival, to develop her on-stage alter ego. Her innate musicality and instinctive feel for the surreal combined in the enigmatic Miss Murgatroid, purveyor of swirling dronescapes, Balkan-flavoured fairy tales, and compelling collaborations with artists as diverse as American Primitive guitar innovator John Fahey and one-woman choir Petra Haden.

      “I’ll never be able to say why, exactly, the accordion resonated with me, but upon playing it, I immediately understood how to create rhythm and drama and a way to express what was in my head,” she says. “Somehow I’d finally found my instrument. I’d thought, ‘Well, maybe I’m not musical,’ coming from a family filled with people who play everything. ‘Maybe I’m just not.’ And then I picked up the accordion, and that changed everything. I made all these records, and my family was like, ‘Wait a second. You’re the only one that actually ever did anything with music. What the hell?’ So I kind of accidentally outgrew my family. It’s not that I am in any way a virtuoso, but with creativity and an instrument that resonated with me, I was able to do a lot.”

      The Miss Murgatroid discography includes two solo albums, Methyl Ethyl Key Tones and Myoc­lyonic Melodies; a rarities compilation, Through Alien Empires, targeted at her Japanese fans; and a pair of duos with Haden, Bella Neurox and Hearts & Daggers. The latter proved a career highlight—but it was also at least indirectly responsible for Rose putting Miss Murgatroid aside for most of the past decade.

      “I made that record with Petra in 2004,” she says of Hearts & Daggers. “Everything was pitched and ready to go and things were looking like it was going to be next-level in a lot of ways for both of us—and then one thing after another happened that felt really kind of bad. The label we had signed to went out of business, so the record got kind of waylaid and only came out in 2008. Which was crazy: all this momentum just kind of fizzled.”

      As compensation, Rose’s other interests blossomed. She continued working in the music industry, primarily as a talent booker for rooms such as Portland’s respected Doug Fir Lounge. Her parallel practice as an art photographer led to video shoots for acts such as the Mastodon, Bob Mould, and Amanda Palmer, and then into more elaborate film productions. This summer she toured her short feature “The Gift of Gravity” on the film-festival circuit, and she’s gearing up to codirect a full-length documentary on unsung psychedelic-music innovator Linda Perhacs.

      And now there’s Miss Murgatroid’s return, which for the moment is a one-off event specifically tailored for Accordion Noir.

      “I don’t know if I’m going to be doing more solo shows,” Rose notes. “As far as I’m concerned this might be it.”

      There will be more music, however. Rose has recently formed a band, Moon Tiger, that includes Blitzen Trapper’s Brian Adrian Koch on drums. And if Miss Murgatroid ends up insisting on further solo appearances, her creator isn’t entirely opposed to that.

      “After all these years, I look at what’s going on in music and there’s nobody doing anything like I did, which is completely insane,” Rose notes. “There’s nobody! There are people playing accordion, but in terms of just taking the accordion and going out with it and having fun with personality and character… For some reason I was able to do something that not a lot of people did. But I did it, and I loved it, and I still love it. And I still can’t believe that what I did was so original—but I guess that’s the nature of the beast.”

      Miss Murgatroid headlines the Accordion Noir Festival at the Orpheum Annex next Sunday (September 14). The festival runs at various venues from next Thursday to Sunday (September 11 to 14).

      Comments

      1 Comments

      Bruce Triggs

      Sep 3, 2014 at 12:30pm

      Great Story, so happy she'll be here.