"I write songs on the toilet. This is my love, my boyfriend, my girlfriend." Ani Difranco pervades her musical spirit like smoke. But there are many more textures in the spirit of this talented, self-taught, battlefield of contradictions. Karin is a field of opposites. A tiny stature with a voice the size of the North Atlantic. An Armenian by heritage that sings in English. A private, demur composer of highly sexual and passionate songs. A wildly hopeful and joyful woman who writes about tragedy. A raging performer with a booming stage presence, yet, off-stage she seems to try to take up as little space as possible. "I don't like what's pretty. I like what's awkward, off. That's hot to me." She doesn't have a normal set of eyes. They're anime eyes, liquid and perceptive: she draws inspiration from the dirt , sweat, semen, anxiety, and nuttiness of the everyday shit we all endure. Songs of wasted hope. Songs of yearning. Songs of betrayal and the rage that fuels the re-birth of love, like a resurrection through violence. Songs that seem to skip to their own time like playful children. Songs that lash, that sting- yet they reward because the lyrics are so fucking beautiful and honest and the performance transcends. Songs that juxtapose the ugly and the beautiful until they're new in your eyes. Songs like passages, like small, freak symphonies. Songs like montages, word soup, messy and hot. Songs so private you wonder if you're allowed to listen. "I love people and I love laughing. But writing joyful would be dishonest without an anti-depressant." Okay, the facts: she's twenty-one; she lives in Los Angeles; she doesn't have a band, it's all her; she's played small venues like Genghis Cohen and has an intense following; she drives a Hybrid; she's close to her three sisters; she speaks fluent Armenian; she's influenced by Ani, Tori Amos, Bjork, Janis Joplin, Nico, Etta James; she has no set style, she follows her muse and says fuck it to the business of cloned music and sound-alike artists; "Drop Dead Fred" is one of her favorite films; she is funny as shit. But the facts are dull compared to the woman-poet-walking-machine-gun. Watch her onstage when she's in the zone, this acoustic athlete. It's like breathing again. -Jose Rivera   © Karin Tatoyan 2005