BRENT GREEN /A BRIEF SPARK BOOKENDED by DARKNESS W
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BRENT GREEN / A BRIEF SPARK BOOKENDED BY DARKNESS w/ The Messthetics CONTACT: Thomas O. Kriegsmann, President E [email protected] T 917.386.5468 www.arktype.org ABOUT A BRIEF SPARK BOOKENDED BY DARKNESS A wholly unique live cinema experiment live cinema conceived and illustrated by acclaimed filmmaker, mu- sician and author Brent Green, the work features live music by The Messthetics (Brendan Canty and Joe Lally of Fugazi with guitarist Anthony Pirog) and includes several short film works all narrated live with addition- al musical accompaniment. The full length evening of work includes A Brief Spark Bookended by Darkness, Carlin, Paulina Hollers, Hadacol Christmas and Strange Fates, along with Green’s own commentary and unfurl- ing rapport with the audience that defines the unique, localized experience of every engagement. A Brief Spark Bookended by Darkness is characterized by Green’s spindly drawing style and moving musical score guided by spoken lyrics in the artist’s inimitable, quivering voice. The story he recounts is caught up in despair and apprehension – as he seeks comfort by losing himself in his love of another. The world that Green presents is so intimate as to verge on the claustrophobic, a startling carnival set-up in a cramped bedroom. Though made to appear damaged and from another era, everything about A Brief Spark is calculated, consid- ered and timed to affect. All of this poignantly represents Green’s themes of deep and desperate love, in a world that is endlessly on the verge of calamity. 2 3 4 TOUR & PRODUCTION AVAILABILITY 2019-20 WORLDWIDE OPEN Space: Black Box / Proscenium Tour Personnel: 4 Performers 1 Tech / Company Management Schedule: Same Day Load-in / Tech / Perform 5 COMPANY BIOGRAPHIES Working on his farm outside of New Paltz, NY, Brent urgent and inspired, and the portraits of musicians and Green is a self-taught visual artist and filmmaker. houses expose the Green’s films have screened, often with live musical transient nature accompaniment, in film and art settings alike at ven- of our world. ues such as MoMA, BAM, The Getty, Walker, Hammer Trixie has also Museum, produced films The Kitchen, about Bob Mould, Boston MFA, Wilco, Death Cab Wexner, Indi- for Cutie, Eddie anapolis Mu- Vedder and the seum of Art, Decemberists. He Rotterdam currently lives in Film Festival, Washington, DC Sundance with his wife and Film Festi- four children and val as well has been touring as rooftops, around with his warehouses new band Mess- and galleries thetics. throughout the globe. Of- ten, his sculp- Best known as a member of Fugazi, Joe Lally first tural work and learned bass after seeing a Minor Threat show with large-scale Dag Nasty’s Peter Cortner, which prompted them to installation form a band. In 1987 he joined up with Ian MacKaye, are displayed Brendan Canty, and Guy Picciotto to make Fugazi, one alongside of the most important groups in the American under- his animated ground scene. In 2002, as Fugazi was on hiatus, Lally films, he’s got together with ex-Frodus members Shelby Cinca and had solo Jason Hamacher as Black Sea and released a single that exhibitions at year, soon after changing their name to Decahedron a bunch of places including the ASU Art Museum, Site and issuing a full- Santa Fe, The Kohler Arts Center and the Berkeley Art length, Disconnection Museum. Green’s work has been supported by Creative Imminent, in 2004. Capital, the Sundance Institute, San Francisco Film That same year Lally Society and the MAPfund. His art is in some fine public joined up with John collections including MoMA, the Hammer Museum and Frusciante and Josh the American Folk Art Museum. Green is represented Klinghoffer as Ataxia by the Andrew Edlin Gallery in NYC. and released Auto- matic Writing. During this same time period Brendan Canty is best known as the drummer in the Lally also ran the small band Fugazi. Canty joined Fugazi in 1987, before which label Tolotta, which time he played in Rites of Spring, One Last Wish, he initially started in Deadline, Insurrection, and Happy Go Licky. In addition order to help distribute to producing records for all kinds of great bands (the singles from bands Thermals, Ted Leo, Garland of Hours, Benjy Ferree) who might have had Canty frequently composes soundtrack music, primar- trouble getting their ily for Discovery Channel and National Geographic music out otherwise, though he did end up putting out Channel documentaries and independent features. In some full-lengths from artists like Spirit Caravan and 2004, Canty co-founded the DVD label Trixie to release Stinking Lizaveta. In 2006 Lally released his first solo an ongoing series of music-related films entitled Burn record, There to Here, a sparse, bass-driven set, on the To Shine. The series involves independent bands from D.C. punk label (run by MacKaye) Dischord, while Noth- a particular city showing up to perform one song each, ing Is Underrated, which featured contributions from live, without overdubs or corrections, in a condemned both MacKaye and Picciotto, among others, appeared the house. It’s beautiful. The films and performances are following year. 6 ARTIST MATERIALS & PRESS Brent Green Website Website: https://site.nervousfilms.com Brent Green Film Samples: https://site.nervousfilms.com/multimedia/ Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then (Full Version) https://vimeo.com/46885196 password: paulbunyan The Messthetics https://themessthetics.bandcamp.com https://www.dischord.com/band/messthetics 7 Joe Lally and Brendan Canty hadn’t performed together in 15 years — the exact amount of time they’d spent as the bassist and drummer in Fugazi, one of punk rock’s most influential bands of the 1980s and ’90s — when they played their first gig as the Messthetics last May at a tiny bar in suburban Washington, D.C. What pulled them back together was Anthony Pirog, a young electric guitarist from the Washington area, who had been listening to Fugazi since childhood. In the past few years he has accrued a mystique in various pockets of the city’s music world — jazz, indie rock, the media-mixing avant-garde — but remains little-known outside Washington. Maybe the Messthetics’ new album is the sound of that changing. The self-titled release, a compendium of experimental rock that runs from hazy to hard-charging, is due out Friday on Dischord Records. The storied, Washington-based label put out all of Fugazi’s albums, and is still run by that band’s onetime frontman, Ian MacKaye. Fugazi marked a turning point in the city’s musical history, broadening Washington’s seminal hardcore sound into a more openhanded aesthetic. The Lally-Canty rhythm section offered a syncopated, lustily grooving backbone in contrast to the speed and thrash of punk up to that point. As a child, Mr. Pirog gobbled up their influence, but mixed it with an appetite for instrumental music. His own sound suggests a remarkable distillation of about 60 years of electric guitar history. On his debut solo album, “Palo Colorado Dream,”released in 2014, his nearest antecedent is Nels Cline — the downtown New York guitarist known for his palette of ghostly effects — but you’ll also quickly find the warble of Bill Frisell; Sonny Sharrock’s searing swarm; the noisy clatter of Glenn Branca. Mr. Canty, 52, started noticing Mr. Pirog, now 38, around town a few years ago, and inspiration began to flow upstream, back across the generations. “He was playing really wildly different things in every situation, so I couldn’t quite understand who he was as a guitar player,” Mr. Canty said. But the disorientation converted swiftly into fascination. “I was attracted to that.” Mr. Lally, 54, had recently moved back to Washington from Italy, and the old confreres were looking to form a group. Mr. Canty suggested they give Mr. Pirog a shot; the trio began jamming at Mr. Canty’s rehearsal space, and clicked immediately. The original idea was to play music Mr. Lally had written, but soon the elder musicians found themselves turning to Mr. Pirog for creative fuel. “Seeing the kind of guitar player Anthony was didn’t really make me want to play my music,” Mr. Lally said of their first jam session, in fall 2016. Mr. Pirog began bringing in tangled melodies and odd-metered patterns, and flinging them at the band at high speeds. “It’s funny because Anthony was asking things of us that Fugazi asked of us, honestly,” Mr. Canty said. “It feels like catching baseballs in a batting cage.” The record maintains the raw vibe of those early sessions: It was captured on basic equipment, the guitar and bass recorded straight from their amps, in Mr. Canty’s rehearsal space above a Washington club. Fugazi was never a band about virtuosity, exactly, but it wasn’t opposed to the principle. Started in 1986, the quartet flew a flag of conviction in an insouciant era: First-generation indie rock was on the up, with bands like Dinosaur Jr. and Sonic Youth proposing abstention as rebellion. But Fugazi went for something direct and throttling; it played around with Jamaican dub, the loose-limbed punk coming from California, and drops of minimalism, arriving at a dark, stony, hard-bitten sound. Unlike past iterations of punk, the currency was its heft, not its speed. The same could be said of “The Messthetics,” though Mr. Pirog’s playing here introduces something else. It can feel both misty and assertive, partly because of the way his effects pedals create something hot and threatening, as if he’s immolating his own notes as soon as they arrive. The new album begins with “Mythomania,” centered on a classic, low-boil bass line from Mr.