About Dara Korra'ti (a.k.a. Solarbird the Lightbringer)
CRIME and the Forces of Evil
(C) 2010-2012 Dara Korra'ti/CRIME and the Forces of Evil

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Dara writes the songs, sings the vocals, plays the instruments, engineers the albums, and is probably the only supervillain to have sung for the Dalai Lama.

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Dara Korra'ti - a.k.a. Solarbird the Lightbringer - is the bandleader of CRIME and the Forces of Evil. The only member of the band without a supervillain-arrest-warrant, she's also a self-taught songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and vocalist who plays the Irish bouzouki, mandolin, bass guitar, flute, bodhran, djembe, and other instruments. When she needs a new sound, she invents something, putting her hard-earned mad science skills to good - or, perhaps, evil - use. Having built a secret lair/recording studio, she recorded and engineered the band's first album, _Dick Tracy Must Die_, in 2010-2011. She can also repair your laptop - but won't.

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Dara Korra'ti waded into music via flutemaking, before being shoved abruptly into the deep end by her musician friend Alec, and was playing out six months after picking up a stringed instrument for the first time. Her music comes raw and untempered from the elven id; her politics come from years of deep involvement, which she hated; and her attitude comes from losing too many times - on torture, on the surveillance state, on wars of choice, on the principle of a presidency constrained by law, and from the fundamentalist war against women and queer equality.

Now, as both herself and her superhero-turned-supervillain-turned-musician alternate persona, Solarbird the Lightbringer, she's the bandleader of CRIME and the Forces of Evil. A self-taught songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and vocalist, she plays the Irish bouzouki, mandolin, bass guitar, flute, bodhran, djembe, and other instruments. Using her mad science skills, when she needs a new sound, she invents something, like her Trash-O-Matic 68000, or her hammered mandolin. Having also built a secret-lair-cum-recording-studio, she recorded and engineered her band's first album, _Dick Tracy Must Die_, in 2010-2011. She can even repair your laptop - but won't.

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Dara wasn't a musician, when the world changed underneath her; she was a researcher in biology and a software developer in computer science, and had a little art career going on the side. With her glass sculpture in galleries, she was arty, but not yet a musician. She likes to say that she didn't change, the world did - but that's not entirely true, now, is it?

It started with the flutes, or more correctly, with the flutemaking. Dara made them. Ironically, not out of metal, but bamboo; she was one of the very few registered martial arts combat flute makers in Cascadia, when that registry existed. But the Seattle folk band Three Good Measures - so called because in early rehearsals that's how many they could get out in a row - needed a flautist, and were meeting to jam in her house with her partner Anna, and said "hey, Dara, you make flutes - you can play, too, right?" It's not as true as you might think, but she learned fast, and started adding backing vocals and percussion in with the flutework. Along the way, she picked up a little choral work, including a gig singing in the chorus for the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Reverend Desmond Tutu, in Seattle.

TGM weren't going to go anywhere, and in fact didn't - the closest to a single before the band broke up was "You Woke Up My Neighbourhood," off the unreleased demo EP "Duck!" - but out of the wreckage of that group came the bands Xander, The Popular Monsters, Twelve Good Measures, and, at the urging of fellow musician Alexander James Adams, Dara's group CRIME and the Forces of Evil.

Dara began playing out by busking, solo, in 2008, after her return from Japan, following that with songwriting and recording. Early demos resulted in gigs from Vancouver south to Redmond, Oregon, and from Seattle east to Boston, Massachusetts, during which time Dara was teaching herself how to build a recording studio and engineer recordings properly.

The first official output from her band came in January 2010, with the release of the four-track studio demo _Sketchy Characters_. This spawned offers of sponsorship towards a proper full-length, and much of the money for her projects has come from such sponsorship efforts from people who heard that and other demo tracks. In various stages of planning and execution are the instrumental-only _Distractions_, the piracy-and-revolution folk album _Cracksman Betty_, and the next major CRIME and the Forces of Evil studio project, _Din of Thieves_. But the main effort has been on the first full-length studio CD, released in March 2011 as _Dick Tracy Must Die_. (As Dara says, "That fucker's gotta go.")

Dara is currently working on revising the year-long song-a-month project, _Cracksman Betty_, into a final form, as well as putting together shows for the summer and autumn of 2012 and writing more new music. If you like what you hear, contact her through the website for bookings, at http://crimeandtheforcesofevil.com/contact.php.