Gitane Demone

Beginning her professional path as part of the early-’80s Southern California new wave trio Pompeii 99, Gitane Demone later joined goth rockers Christian Death as keyboardist and vocalist alongside Rozz Williams. She stayed with the band until moving to Amsterdam in 1989, at which point she launched a solo career that grew steadily more torch-oriented across the EPs A Heavenly Melancholy and Lullabies for a Troubled World. The 1994 live album With Love and Dementia preceded her 1995 reunion with Williams on Every Dreamhouse Heartache.

A subsequent partnership with Mark Ickx under the Demonix name produced Never Felt So Alive; the solo album Am I Wrong? arrived in 1998, and both Life in Death and Love for Sale followed in 1999. That same year Dreadful Shadows assisted her on the studio album Stars of Trash, which was reissued in 2004. Cult Epics issued the career-spanning biographical DVD set Life After Death in 2008.

Demone formed the Crystelles with daughter Zara Kand and released Attach and Detach in 2010 while also performing with the experimental noise band +DOG+. In 2013 she worked with Loopooloo and Syphilis Sauna as Hedone Tears, issuing the digital single “Moonlit Paradise,” which appeared again in 2015 with an untitled flip side under her own name.

The Gitane Demone Quartet, assembled that same year with life partner and former Christian Death bandmate Rikk Agnew, ex-the Screamers keyboardist Paul Roessler, and Deb Venom (Debra Erin Benham), fused gothic rock and contemporary jazz. Their first release, the single “Standard Upright,” was followed in 2016 by the self-released digital full-length Past the Sun, which Germany’s Dark Vinyl Records issued in physical formats the following year.