Christa Ebert, also known as Uno Lady, puts on a performance that needs to be seen to be believed.
Whoever said you needed more than one person to form a band forgot to tell Christa Ebert. Performing under the moniker Uno Lady, this one-woman choir uses a microphone, small mixer and loop pedal perched on a podium to create an emotional musical experience. Each performance is a little bit different as Ebert, 35, uses her pedalboard to layer haunting melodies with syncopated beats on top of rich soundscapes to create her distinctly transportive music. With a record on the way this year, Ebert continues to create new sounds to entrance and mesmerize her audiences.My earliest memories are of singing. I remember trying to organize a concert on the playground in the third grade. I have no choice but to sing. It’s a part of me.Uno Lady is basically myself, but a fancier version. I have always wanted to be in a band, but it just wasn’t happening. So I started to create music on my own. At my first gig at Pat’s in the Flats in 2007, I sang into my computer alongside a projection of an old drug education film to have a visual element. I would describe Uno Lady as a one-woman ghost choir, lush layers, captivating, mesmerizing, always spinning you into a musical web.My process has definitely evolved over the years. I started with a laptop and a microphone and then built my first homemade podium with a space for my computer and my loop pedals so I could build songs live and the audience could see me create.
Letting the audience see my process helps them get in the moment with me and be a part of a shared experience. Music is a way to connect with total strangers. It’s a way to find your tribe hundreds of miles from your home. I really appreciate when someone shares their attention and is open to experience the performance with me. It makes us feel like we’re in it together.
Sometimes after the show, people will share that I reached them or inspired them to create their own music.
I had a tough biker guy once tell me I made him cry. I had written a song called “Ash Wednesday” about a tragic fire that happened in Lakeview Elementary School in 1908. I told that biker guy, “I’m sorry, and you’re welcome.”
During a show, I get caught up in the moment, lost in the music, and I’m part of that place and time where everything floats by. Ideally, I reach a good flow and nothing is going through my head except the music. But it took a lot of work and discipline to get to that space. I used to have intense stage fright. Nerves are proof that I am challenging myself, trying something new and growing as a person.
At the end of a concert, I want audiences to know that they are not alone and that someone understands them. They can do whatever they want to do. — as told to Ken Schneck
My face hurts from smiling. I love the Panza Foundation and am honored to be a recipient of their generosity. They provide something truly unique and very much needed in the Cleveland music community. I thank you from the bottom of my heart.
In addition to playing dozens of shows this past year, experimental “one woman choir” Uno Lady became an Earthquaker Devices artist, and now incorporates many of Akron-made pedals into her creations. She was also part of Dark Songs, a week-long collaborative songwriting festival at the Holiday Music Motel in Sturgeon Bay, WI which ends with a two day show at their local performance art theater, Third Avenue Playhouse. This coming year, Uno Lady plans to write and record a new album with the support of the Panza Foundation.”
June 9, 2017 – “The angel of illness arrives during the Lady Uno Concert. Her melodies come from whale songs. She says she casts spells and as I grow more nauseous I think she meant that literally. I excuse myself and go throw up. Food poisoning? Criticism should not acknowledge the limits of the critics body, I tell myself. But my body has a different idea. Uno Lady has a small podium with purple lights which she sits behind. The faint outline of a projector outlines the wall behind her.
She’s been doing this for a while, somebody whispers to me.
She describes herself as a “one woman choir” and the description seems apt. Have you ever had a moment when you know you’re watching a star? I don’t mean a celebrity. I mean somebody who pulsates like a light from a very long distance away which may or may not still exist. She loops her voice so tightly there’s almost no room for anything else, which works. The song “Underground,” feels like it could leap into a dance track at any moment but never does. Her lyrical imagery from the natural world combined with a stage presence which relies on skill over affect to compel you to watch join with her commitment to seeing a musical mood to its breaking point. Her material reminds me of a sonic world in between Joanna Newsom and Frank Ocean with a little bit of Joy Division thrown in there, but all happening on Venus. Or maybe just Cleveland in 2017.
I excuse myself, get info from the gallerist about what I’ve seen, and toss and turn under a spell, with a bowl next to my bed just in case it happens again, or I catch some starlight.” Full post here
I visited EarthQuaker Devices in Akron, Ohio to record this new song I wrote, “Underground.”
Video by Chris Tran, Brad Throla and Jess France. Audio recorded by Jeff France at EarthQuaker Audio Recording Laboratory.
EarthQuaker Devices built me a pedal board and now my sound library feels limitless. I’m sonically inspired – like a jolt to my creative process. I’m playing around with Avalanche Run, Disaster Transport Sr., Levitation, Arpaniod, Bows, Afterneath, Transmisser, The Depths, Night Wire, and the Organizer. Check out each device here. EarthQuaker Devices pedals are handmade by fellow musicians and music lovers in Akron, Ohio and have a lifetime warranty.
AKRON, OH – “Cleveland’s Christa Ebert is a one-woman choir. As Uno Lady, she’s dazzled, confounded, and delighted audiences since 2007 with loop-based compositions for voice, found sounds, and effects pedals. Her avant-garde pop tunes combine doo-wop harmonies and ethereal soundscapes with layered and processed vocals, which range from a smoky tenor to operatic outbursts of melody.
In this performance of “Underground” she uses the Bows’ treble mode with the Afterneath and Disaster Transport SR to craft an ambient, slightly overdriven wordless backing vocal that sits tight in the mix before adding the melody. From her DIY suitcase podium, she builds layer upon intertwining layer of call-and-response vocal patterns that lift off into a dreamlike fugue state before engaging the Avalanche Run at the song’s end, using the reverse function to bring it all tumbling down, down to the “underground” of the song’s namesake.” –Arron Rogers, EQD
DANGEROUS MINDS – September 13,2016 – “Almost a decade ago, Cleveland music audiences began to be charmed and amused by a sprightly new presence known as Uno Lady, a memorable one-lady act with a seemingly preternatural gift for harmonizing, daft wordplay, and knob twiddling….
Music critics love mashing up well-known artists to define the essentially un-definable traits of what makes an artist unique, and I’m going to engage in a little of that now. Uno Lady is (more or less) one part Reggie Watts (you know, with the genius knob-twiddling), one part Laurie Anderson, and one part, ah, the Swingle Sisters, maybe? But it has to be emphasized that the overall tone isn’t like any of those people, it’s closer to a ‘New Sincerity’ figure such as Wes Anderson (whom she name-checks in one of her song titles)….
Today marks the premiere of her video for “Bikini Weeding,” which is the 5th track on Amateur Hour. The video was directed and co-produced by Uno Lady with Lauren Voss and Teresa Crockett of Sugarbowl Creative.”
“Wed 7/13 @ 6-9PM The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum has dramatically upped the number of performances it’s presenting this summer, and its traditional free Summer in the City series, taking place outdoors on its plaza, is focusing mainly on the wealth of talent in our own backyard.
“Uno Lady aka Christa Ebert, who won a CPAC Creative Workforce Fellowship for her unusual music, which is created entirely by layering her voice with a sequencer to create dreamy, melodic tunes that are hard to resist. She’ll share the bill with indie rock quartet Goldmines whose moody sound is driven with an intense, if subliminal, energy.- Cool Cleveland
STURGEON BAY, WI – “40 musicians from across the country are getting together for the seventh annual songwriting project hosted by rockers pat mAcdonald and melaniejane at the Holiday Music Motel in Sturgeon Bay…. They’ll join much of mAcdonald’s ‘basic core of regulars,’ including acoustic musicians Mike Bleck and Elliot Goettelman, funk queen Kim Manning, alt-rocker Geri X, psychedelic bluesman Charles Boheme, one-woman choir Uno Lady, young indie musician Tarl Knight and others from a wide variety of musical genres.”
– Christopher Clough, Green Bay Press Gazette, October 29, 2015, full article
Christa Ebert, also known as Uno Lady, puts on a performance that needs to be seen to be believed.
