OWNER OF CHOP SHOP MUSIC SUPERVISION GOT HER START IN THE MUSIC BUSINESS AS A ROCK PROMOTER IN CHAMPAIGN, ILLINOIS. SHE MOVED TO LOS ANGELES IN 1990 AND WORKED IN THE FILM/TV DEPARTMENT AT BMI. SHE THEN MOVED ON TO WORK IN 1994 FOR ROGER CORMAN AT CONCORDE FILMS, WHERE SHE WAS MUSIC COORDINATOR AND SUPERVISOR ON OVER 50 B-MOVIE CLASSICS (“CAGED HEAT 3000,” “PIRANHA 2,” “BUCKET OF BLOOD,” ETC.) IN A THREE-YEAR SPAN.

AFTER HER STINT AT CONCORDE, ALEXANDRA STARTED HER OWN COMPANY, CHOP SHOP MUSIC SUPERVISION, WHERE SHE MUSIC SUPERVISED THE TV SHOWS “ROSWELL,” “CARNIVALE,” “BOSTON PUBLIC,” “FASTLANE” AND “THE OC,” AND THE FILMS “HAPPY, TEXAS,” “WASTED,” “DANCING AT THE BLUE IGUANA,” “JOHN TUCKER MUST DIE” AND “THE INVISIBLE.”

ALEXANDRA AND HER STAFF AT THE CHOP SHOP TALENTED MUSIC COORDINATORS KASEY TRUMAN, GINGER WHITMAN AND BRITTANY WARFIELD ARE CURRENTLY WORKING ON THE TV SHOWS “GREY'S ANATOMY,” “PRIVATE PRACTICE,” “CHUCK,” “GOSSIP GIRL,” “WITHOUT A TRACE,” “RESCUE ME,” “MAD MEN,” “SUPERNATURAL” AND “NUMB3RS.”

ALEXANDRA PRODUCED THE SOUNDTRACKS FOR “GREY’S ANATOMY VOLUMES 1, 2 AND 3,” “THE OC,” “RESCUE ME,” “JOHN TUCKER MUST DIE,” “THE INVISIBLE” AND “ROSWELL.” THE CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED “MUSIC FROM THE OC” SOUNDTRACK SERIES (MIXES 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 AND 6) HAVE SOLD OVER A MILLION COPIES WORLDWIDE AND “GREY’S ANATOMY VOLUME 2” WAS NOMINATED FOR A GRAMMY (INCLUDES TRACKS BY THE FRAY AND SNOW PATROL). SHE IS CURRENTLY WORKING ON THE “MAD MEN” SOUNDTRACK.

ALEXANDRA HAS BEEN PROFILED IN WIRED, GLAMOUR, THE NEW YORK POST, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, IN STYLE, THE CHICAGO SUN-TIMES, THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE, ELLE, JANE, BILLBOARD, GIANT AND THE NEW YORK TIMES. CNBC AND MTV HAVE ALSO PRODUCED PIECES ON CHOP SHOP. SHE HAS BEEN NAMED BY ADVERTISING AGE AS “ENTERTAINMENT MARKETER OF THE YEAR,” THE LOS ANGELES TIMES AS ONE OF “THE WEST 100,” VARIETY AS ONE OF FIFTY HONOREES FOR THEIR ANNUAL “WOMEN’S IMPACT REPORT,” AND AS ONE OF BILLBOARD’S “TOP WOMEN IN MUSIC.”

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THE O.C. MIX 6 – COVERING OUR TRACKS

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ROSWELL (ORIGINAL TELEVISION SOUNDTRACK)

With their Chop Shop Records debut album, Keep Color, The Republic Tigers have arrived with an impressive breadth of vision that instantly marks them as something extraordinary. Epic yet intimate, tracks like “Made Concrete” and the towering “Buildings & Mountains” see the Kansas City-based quintet weaving future folk, euphoric psychedelia, and exuberant symphonic pop with intricately crafted electronic textures and uncommon emotional depth. The result is a bold and beautiful collection of strikingly human music that holds an aural mirror to our ever more technologically integrated society.

“It’s a sound that’s half organic and half synthetic, kind of like how all our lives are now,” says singer/multi-instrumentalist Kenn Jankowski. “It’s the common theme throughout all of the songs and we tried to approach it audibly as well.”

A pastor’s son, Jankowski grew up all over the US, ultimately winding up in the Springfield suburb of Republic, Missouri. In 1999, he moved to Kansas City where he began playing guitar in The People, a rock outfit later to become known as The Golden Republic. Around the same time, he became friendly with another local musician, Adam McGill, then playing in a local band. The two shared a common interest in modern pop and avant-garde electronica, subgenres that didn’t necessarily fit the modus operandi of their full-time bands.

When the Golden Republic split in early 2006, Jankowski immediately reached out to McGill. Demos were exchanged, common bonds reaffirmed and The Republic Tigers were born.

“’The Republic Tiger’ was my high-school mascot,” Jankowski says of the moniker, “and the name always rang to me in a nice way. I don’t like band names very much and I don’t like thinking about them either, so I just took something that I knew was timeless to me, and big enough that we could color it with our music and create its meaning with our songs.”

The line-up quickly expanded over the following months, with guitarist/pianist Ryan Pinkston, bassist Marc Pepperman, and drummer Justin Tricomi each bringing a new color to the paintbox. “It was what we’d all always dreamed of,” Jankowski says, “which was to work with other people kind of like us.”

“Everybody in the band is a multi-instrumentalist,” explains McGill, “so when someone brings a demo to the table it’s usually a close-to-complete song. The stuff that’s missing is where the other members contribute. We just pass things back and forth until we’re all happy with it.”

Over the next year, The Republic Tigers recorded a series of demos, with each member working individually on home-recordings which were then enmeshed into a single unified whole. The goal from the start was to incorporate elements of indie, electronica, pop, and even classical music into something distinctive and idiosyncratically their own. Jankowski was determined to bring “a different approach to each song. I wanted each song to be a story in its own world, like a little book.”

A self-released EP emerged in late 2007, but The Republic Tigers’ intent was always geared towards the longform and the album more than fulfills their lofty aspirations. From the rapid-fire “Golden Sand” to the swirling chorale of “Contortionists,” the Keep Color album is ambitious, imaginative, and utterly unforgettable – all ringing guitars, sweeping orchestrations, and immense marching beats.

The elaborate sound belies the fact that the band continued to record the bulk of the material in the comfort of their own residences, though additional tracking was done at KC’s TK Studios, as well as at Run Riot Recordings, where Tricomi works as an engineer. Mixing for the album was done at The Ballroom in Hollywood, CA with engineer Mark Needham (The Killers, Louis XIV, We Are Scientists). Still, the album remains an essentially homespun affair, with Jankowski going so far as to record the majority of his vocals in his bedroom.

“If you listen carefully,” he suggests, “you might hear crickets and traffic and cop cars, creaking of the floors and drunk roommates running into the walls.”

The Republic Tigers’ naturalistic approach includes the prodigious use of acoustic guitars, accordion, trumpet, and trombone, though such old school instrumentation is countered by seemingly infinite waves of blissed-out synths, programmed strings and multi-tracked harmonies. The band revel in blurring the boundaries between the authentic and the ersatz, with the contrast and combination adding up to an ingenious, indefinable sound all its own.

That aural ambiguity is matched by the album’s inspired lyrical content, with tracks like “Feelin’ The Future” or the incendiary “Give Arm To Its Socket” offering a veritable moebius-strip of textual undertones. Jankowski’s “stories” span the political to the personal, as finely etched character studies give way to frank introspection.

The band is well aware of how their variety of muso craftsmanship can lose its way when taken out of the studio confines. They began playing out mere months after getting together, taking great care to translate the music’s elaborate energy to fit the constraints of live performance.

“We have to sift through everything to find what’s essential to the vibe,” McGill says. “If there are 12 keyboard tracks in a song, you can’t really play that many parts in a live setting. You only have a certain number of fingers and let’s face it, keyboards just aren’t that interesting to watch people play live. So we’ll pull the essential tracks and play our live instrumentation along with them.”

With the completion of Keep Color, the band has already begun setting their sights forward, looking into new ways of constructing and expanding their beguiling brand of widescreen bedroom symphonies.

“It already feels like more orchestral things will work their way into the mix,” McGill notes, “while maintaining that pop songwriting sensibility at the core. That’s what we all love. We’re not ashamed to say we love pop music; it’s not something to be embarrassed of.”

“It’s growing and it’s changing,” Jankowski says. “We’ve been experimenting with writing all together, even occasionally jamming some things. We just want to try as many things as we can think of.”

Blending Gershwin’s style of symphonic masterpieces, Beethoven’s skill for intricately crafted melodies and a passion for Radiohead, Yo La Tengo and Sparklehorse, Jade McNelis proudly unveils her debut EP, All The Fables (Good Fences), and readies herself to overturn every stone and set straight the fact from fiction while winning over the media and the masses, alike.

As myths are passed and stories told throughout the ages, the words become more and more ornate while the memories lose their meanings. On All The Fables, McNelis weaves her way through a collection of noirish lullabies, electronic verses and sexy preludes to form her own anthology of life lessons, childhood souvenirs and memoirs left untouched by neither fib or foe nor wild invention.

Twenty-year-old singer-songwriter Jade McNelis was born in Taiwan, adopted by an American couple at age one, and began learning the piano at age five. Discovered when she opened for Stars in her hometown of Tallahassee, Florida, McNelis’ raw talent made her an obvious standout. She was soon after approached by new Montreal label Good Fences, who quickly signed her. McNelis came to Montreal in the summer of 2006 to record All The Fables. Co-produced by Chris Seligman (of Stars) and Drew Malamud (the Dears, Death From Above 1979, Stars), All The Fables EP was recorded at Studio Plateau and masterfully mixed by Ryan Hadlock at Seattle’s famed Bear Creek Studio.