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Criss Angel (born Christopher N. Sarantakos December 19, 1967 in East Meadow, New York) is an American musician, magician, illusionist, escapologist, stunt performer, and the creator and director of the Criss Angel Mindfreak television series on A&E Network.

Career as an Illusionist

Criss Angel is currently starring in the second season of Mindfreak which is filmed at the Aladdin Resort in Las Vegas, Nevada. Some allege that Angel uses camera special effects, forced viewing angles and assistants acting as amazed spectators for the tv audience, and this has caused controversy among fellow magicians. Some believe that he actually has magical powers. Many magicians who perform magic without camera tricks resent these methods while others simply see them as modern tools of magic on televison . Criss Angel himself claims he does not use camera trickery, and had made an attempt to debunk these rumors during the second season by introducing a "Spectator's Point of View camera", a handheld video camera given to a random person in the audience to literally shoot the action in any way he or she wants. However, the camera has seemingly fell out of favor as the second season continued, only showing up very sporadically.

Fans of Criss Angel have compared him to similar street magician David Blaine, to the point of assuming there is a rivalry going on between them. However, Criss has indicated that he doesn't see any such rivalry existing between them, noting that Blaine had come to visit him and offer his support during his Oasis stunt, after Blaine had failed to successfully complete his own similarly-themed stunt, Drowned AliveHowever, he did state in an interview on Penn Jillette's radio talk show that, if David Blaine was able to perform an illusion that he wasn't able to trump or duplicate, he would retire on the spot. So far, however, Blaine and his associates haven't taken him up on his challenge[http://tv.zap2it.com/tveditorial/tve_main/1,1002,271%7C84358%7C1%7C,00.html.

Musical career

Criss Angel was in an industrial band called Angeldust, which he started with Klay Scott (now known as Klayton of Celldweller) after Klayton's previous band Circle of Dust broke up. Angeldust released an album called Musical Conjurings from the World of Illusion in 1998 and performed in Madison Square Garden. He has also released several more CDs as Criss Angel.

Discography

All of these albums were self-released under APITRAG Records.

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Criss Angel".

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