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CAROL LIPNIK'S SPOOKARAMA EVOKES A CONEY ISLAND OF THE EAR full of ghostly, carnivalesque moments. She grew up on Coney Island and performing a whirling, haunting music, conveys a sense of this historically significant but decaying urban landscape. On Lipnik's self released album “Bow Down Moon” (Mermaid Alley Music), accordions wheeze, lonely saxophones wail and Lipnik's 5-octave voice soars and dips; the characters in her songs peek into lost alleyways, peer down the abandoned boardwalk, gaze into the endless ocean. They've lost their way in the world, and they've wound up in Coney Island's rich phantasmagoria of American gothic myth. Live, Josh Matthews, a member of the Blue Man Group, adds all sorts of drum and percussion effects such as whistles, clown horns, sirens, bells and gongs, to Spookarama's sound. Mia Theodoratis performs on electric harp, David Kannenstine adds bass, and Bruce Huron plays saxophone.

Michael Kramer – THE NEW YORK TIMES


LIPNIK AND SPOOKARAMA are a New York oddity, playing bizarre folk-rock tales from the bent side of life; what else would you expect from someone with Coney Island in her soul?

Mike Wolf – TIME OUT NEW YORK


“Georgie porgie pumpkin pie/kissed this girl and made her cry/cross my heart and hope to die/stick a needle in my eye.” So goes just two of the many harmless taunts between innocent children on the neighborhood playground. Harmless and innocent? Think again. When you hear Carol Lipnik's haunting voice categorizing these infantile ribbings, you realize just how deep the scars of childhood can go. A childhood in Coney Island, no less, can be of an even deeper sort, and so informs the music of CAROL LIPNIK AND SPOOKARAMA.Ghostly images of Brooklyn, pelvic grooves, and a New Orleans Voodoo/ creepy carnival feel combine to make Lipnik a must-see.

Jordan Heller – SHOUT NEW YORK


CAROL LIPNIK: A Coney Island native who identifies with freaks, and parts of freaks in jars, Lipnik's luscious blues echo in the abandoned pleasure palace, whose myth thumps behind her like a dying beast with an accordion and the carousel's endless pump. In “The Pinhead's Lullabye,” her voice rising to a ghost's delicate tremble, a child equates the hum of a lightbulb with the sound of it's dead mother's love.

Melanie Bush – THE VILLAGE VOICE



(on MY LIFE AS A SINGING MERMAID)
A new favorite late night disc

Bob Brainen – WFMU top ten list for 1999

Lipnik's Coney Island roots grow deep in the swamp muck of a N'awlins amusement park. Voodoo vapors of musical magic rise in the luscious lullabies and original songs galore. The awesome cover of the Ramones' classic “I Wanna Be Sedated” will have you dropping dead...

Gerry Fialka – Flipside Magazine (on MY LIFE AS A SINGING MERMAID)


Coney Island in winter is like a post-apocalypse dreamscape. Between the abandoned rollercoasters overgrown with weeds, and the cold, empty ocean, lies a stretch of dirty sand that on a bad day resembles an ashtray. Carol Lipnik draws on this scene for inspiration as the songwriter and singer of Spookarama. With roots in the Delta blues, the band adds electric harp, saxophone, and a load of innovative percussion.

SHOUT Magazine


Carol Lipnik is one of the strangest singers you could wish to hear. She delivers her carnivalesque tales in a rich, wicked croon. She comes across as a blood relative of Tom Waits or Captain Beefheart with her original approach to music. She takes the Ramones' high energy song "I Wanna Be Sedated" and transforms it into a spooky lullaby. The droll "Supermodel" makes all other songs on the subject seem shallow. Lipnik can be sweet as well as caustic and that makes this CD worth its weight in gold.

Anna Maria Stjarnell – COLLECTED SOUNDS (on MY LIFE AS A SINGING MERMAID)

Led by Carol Lipnik, a singer with a five-octave range, Spookarama turns out original music rooted in the carney atmosphere of Lipnik's home, Coney Island.

John Donohue – THE NEW YORKER

CAROL LIPNIK chronicles a life spent in the decaying panorama that is/was Coney Island. Anyone who has ever seen the movie Angel Heart on the big screen knows that austere vision of that widescreen shot of Mickey Roarke walking across the beach to see the man from the carny. When the life leaves the circus, when the carnival has become carnivorous and the summer makes way for those gloomy Northeastern winters, it's sad and stark and haunting, like a cute toy left out in the rain. MY LIFE AS A SINGING MERMAID is one of those quintessentially American experiences, like watching Bugs Bunny or an episode of The Twighlight Zone on a Saturday afternoon. Your Dodge Dart won't start, you got laid off from your job (I think they call it “downsizing” these days), you took some records out of the library to explore some new sounds (The Three Penny Opera, Harry Partch, G. Gershwin) as you've worn the grooves off The Ramones' “Leave Home”- nothing seems to help shake off the shade. But Carol Lipnik understands. If Laura Nyro or Diamanda Galas grew up in Brooklyn with Syd Barrett and Randy Newman as her godfathers, the result could be The Devine Ms. L.


If DJ Spooky mix-melded Laura Nyro's “New York Tendaberry” with Tom Waits' “Mule Variations” it might sound something like “MY LIFE AS A SINGING MERMAID.”


CL transmogrifies and distills that eerie pre-Prozac ambiance that only comes from being an American-where the clown that comes to your 6th birthday party later turns out to be John Wayne Gacy or Bobcat Golthwait, and nobody in the neighborhood is that surprised when a body is found down by the factory and you're looked upon as a “weirdo” if you read anything other than the sports page or Seventeen.

Ms. L has a genuinely affecting range, just “dramatic” enough to make her point. But unlike some “theatrical” singers, she injects equal parts warmth, wonder, angst, piss and vinegar into her songs, each a gem of construction. (With her you never feel like you're listening to some Broadway wannabe, or some primal-scream therapy dropout, nor a self-consciously avant-gardener.) Most unsettling is CL's cover of the Ramones' “I wanna Be Sedated,” which is given a deliriously languid reading, as if Lotte Lenya thought it was a variation on “Gloomy Sunday.” Her band completes Lipnik's fractured sonatas, deriving from the zigzag amalgam(s) of Captain Beefheart, Tom Waits, circus music, pre-1962 cartoon music, Raymond Scott and Charles Ives. Call it Great Suburban Music, Ancient To The Future.

Mark Keresman – WATERFRONT WEEK


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