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Arts Playlist: Wilmington's Angela Sheik

Photo Courtesy: Angela Sheik

Angela Sheik is a thoroughly modern singer-songwriter.  The Wilmington based artist is a solo act who doesn’t sit at a piano or on a stool with a guitar. Instead, the multi-instrumentalist creates her own elaborate orchestrations with a looping pedal.

In concert, Sheik has been known to use instrumentation including flute, accordion, keyboard and xylophone. And that’s just her short list.

The musician says the Wilmington arts scene has exploded in recent years.

“Right now it's fantastic,” she notes. “I'd say when I first moved here, it was where I slept and I played everywhere else. These days, it's a great music scene. There are venues to choose from and a lot of community among the artists; visual artists as well as musicians so it's really a great time to be in Wilmington.”

angelashiekpt2.mp3
Part 2 of Delaware Public Media Cathy Carter's interview with Angela Sheik and Sheik performs "“Run for Cover.”

The musician has a new CD “Home Before Dark” and is playing the World Café Live at the Queen on Saturday.  The artist was recently featured on NPR after her video entry in the network’s Tiny Desk Concert contest caught the eye of the judges.

Sheik stands out thanks to her inventive playing style of mixing tracks live during performances and says she discovered looper pedals out of necessity.

“It’s very hard to pay musicians to travel with you so I needed something that I didn’t have to depend on anyone else to do. I still play with people, I love to play with other musicians but I needed something as an artist where I wasn’t waiting for somebody else to show up.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIwI6GXsDgc

This piece is made possible, in part, by a grant from the Delaware Division of the Arts, a state agency dedicated to nurturing and supporting the arts in Delaware, in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts.