The story ch. xiii presents

ARTHURDESH
benefit for arthur magazine, independently curated by michael curtis hilde and produced by todd p.

MV & EE
Peter Stampfel (Holy Modal Rounders) and the Ether Frolic Mob
Dr Ragtime & Pals (Jack Rose Band)
Jana Hunter & TJO
quad (Helen Rush, PG Six, Samara Lubelski, Bob Bannister)
Sharon Van Etten
Mountainhood
Headdress
White Hills

Readings by Louise Landis Levi, Byron Coley and Gary Panter, Wesley Eisold and Max Morton, Angela Jaeger, and Robbie Snyderman

Visuals by Flying Andes

Saturday, February 28, 2009
8pm
$8-30 sliding scale | all ages
Market Hotel
1142 Myrtle Ave
Bushwick, Brooklyn
11221

curator michael curtis hilde .:. readings curator byron coley
.:. production toddpnyc.com .:.

Poster by Arik Roper

Michael Hilde (michael.hilde@gmail.com), who put this benefit together, wrote the following:

About Arthur Magazine and The Story
.:. Arthurdesh: desh is a hindi suffix that denotes a sense of home or country
This special chapter of The Story literally themes as a benefit for the magazine, which in the current depression has been forced to go out of print and take it online. This is unacceptable to myself and many other Arthur readers, as Arthur is the only great American publication to currently be seeing print. The days of Rolling Stone are over, the high-era of rad zines has passed; Arthur stands alone as a sole halcyon of rugged American individualism and the timeless values associated with nature, consciousness, and evolution into higher human potential. Their struggle today is as much a part of The Story as the metaphysical concepts we’ve been discussing up to this point with the series, and we hope that this show will directly turn around real funds to get the mag back on earth.

.:. The Story
The Story is an ongoing music series which tells a continuous narrative from show to show.
The bands tell the story with songs.
Each Chapter is curated by me, Feather (Michael Curtis Hilde from Mountainhood).

Further:
The Story is happening all around us, made of TV molecules, lives, lies, dreams, perceptions. The Story, in and of itself, is an idea that encapsulates all that’s happening on the inner and outer plane, real and superreal, canny and uncanny: everything.
People’s music and lyrics tell it. The purpose of our happenings is to gather together and hear it.
Whatever the narrative may be
~reality decides~
Only We perceive.
Every happening is a new chapter, every band tells the next sentence.

“Who decides The Story but for the Song and the Loom? And Who is there to weep The Story: alone: the dreamer: in her deep-thick reverie. And who is there to dream it, beyond the time we are given?”
–Jesus America, Hunter and Gatherer

“Avant-folkie Michael Curtis Hilde—who performs as Mountainhood—presents the latest chapter of the Story, his bicoastal narrative-concert series.”
–Time Out New York
video: http://www.myspace.com/thestoryhappening
mp3s: http://www.myspace.com/thestoryrecordings

About the Performers

.:. MV & EE
MV & EE have been at it for almost 9 years now and their stunning accomplishments in the idiom of rustic American dream narcotics blues and ragas is just now beginning to reach the ears of the wider realm in a real way. Kicking things off with a rapid fire release schedule of limited edition CDRs on his own Child of Microtones label, MV & EE produced a virtual plumage of unending music bearing rad titles like “The Suncatcher Blossoms a Nova and is So Grateful it is No Longer Willing to Dark the Sun” and “Ragantula.” They’ve since ascended to representation through Ecstatic Peace with forthcoming records from the cloistered and enigmatic Dicristina Stair Builders, the label who re-brought us Vashti Bunyan and the first Vetiver jam. Don’t think twice about not getting super-heavy into the proper inheritors of stoner forefathers Neil Young, the Grateful Dead, and broke down piped-out van-bound roadtrippers forever. “This is heady, strung-out stuff… crash-and-burn idealism and its mesh of Eastern music and mysticism with mutated country blues… a haunting, spaced-out… orgy of grinding feedback and guitar fuzz…” — Playboy Magazine
audio: http://www.myspace.com/mveebummerroad

.:.Peter Stampfel and the Ether Frolic Mob
is one of the founding members of iconic local duo The Holy Modal Rounders. Pioneers, The Modals were first to forge directly American traditionals with consciousness-expansion tonality and song-structure, pushing folk ahead from found-object into futuristic emission of psychic splendor and unveilings of days-to-come. Crew with Dylan, the Fugs, and pre-playwright Sam Shepard on animal skins.
“Peter Stampfel is that rarest of all creatures, a modest genius. He has one of the most distinctive voices in American music, a twangy screech that somehow he can actually sing in. What makes him so modest is his conviction that all of the really great American music was done a long time ago, and mostly collected on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. What makes him a genius is that instead of putting his beloved old-timey music up on some pedestal, he makes it an organic part of his own life experience — which is mostly that of a radical ’60s speed freak who appreciates nothing better than a cosmic joke.” -Rolling Stone
mp3s: myspace.com/peterstampfelmusic

Dr Ragtime & Pals (Jack Rose Band)
Jack Rose has been around for a minute shredding the blood back into a aether-bourne Weissenborn lap steel, a good demon out of Japanese buddhist panoply-myriad transcendental and holy precessions from nirvana. For the first time ever, Rose sheds his petals & loner-Fahey shredder vibe to adopt new skins as Dr. Ragtime and Pals, conjuring a full haunt of sessionists and rhythm masters to back his mile-long riffs and depthlessly blissful plummetings into black talkety-talk sparkly crystal tunage.
“Finally, someone has something to say on an acoustic guitar that hasn’t been said before” -Ben Chasny, Six Organs of Admittance
mp3s: http://www.myspace.com/jackrosekensington

Jana Hunter & TJO
Jana Hunter writes new songs. By new songs, I mean songs that haven’t been written before–a tall order, she fills it. Jana first came to us mysteriously on a split LP with future-legend Devendra Banhart-another writer who fills the order. Whether Banhart discovered Hunter or not is debatable and meaningless, her songs are all her own and continue to break day into the endless night of rehash and convention. She’ll be joined by her full band from B-more and heart-rendingly touching indy Portland singer-songwriter Tara Jean O’Neil, recent darling of Terrastock 7. Doom, love, industry, haunted brains, melting brains, the 80s, come hear an evolutionary American Singer-Songwriter– the rarest of musical animals.
Jana Hunter mp3: http://www.myspace.com/janahunter
TJO mp3s: http://www.myspace.com/tjoistarajaneoneil

.:. quad (Helen Rush, PG Six, Samara Lubelski, Bob Bannister)
In the tradition of all great benefits, Arthurdesh is yeah most definitely a show rife with secret guests, double identities, hidden corridors, and first-time collabos, but none may be so rich and rewarding as the one-off assembly of Helen Rush, P.G. Six, Helen Rush and Bob Bannister as quad. This band comes to us out of a long and winding history of the best in eastern seaboard psych collectives, stretching back to Hall of Fame stuff in the mid-nineties and early Tower Recordings with MV + EE, and even a few recordings here and there with TJO. Helen Rush’s gorgeous windlike voice has been haunting us in a rad way since those early days; P.G. Six (Pat Grubler) has been doing great solo work updating classical english madrigal and ballad sounds for modern ears; Samara Lubelski’s delicate-stoned energy-pop and candy-darling vocals bring us up to speed from the long drag of dready psych dirges. Won’t it be interesting to see what they produce?
Hall of Fame mp3s: http://www.myspace.com/halloffamenyc

.:.Sharon Van Etten
Has been on the Brooklyn scene for a minute heralded as the current voice of New York. Could be true. The force of energy that fuels her tremendous voice with the windpower of the Stanford Linear Accelerator which can hurtle molecules at each other fast enough to break them into one molecule, yet with delicate beauty of a heartstring oscillating so sweetly then finally snapping with sadness, may be the same energy that keeps New York City alive and waking all hours of the day and the night. If you haven’t heard Sharon’s songs, you haven’t heard what’s happening right now.
mp3s: http://www.myspace.com/sharonvanetten

.:. MOUNTAINHOOD
I come from Almaden, a small quicksilver mining town in Northern California. I moved to New York in August, 2008. I feel whales, Navajos, Santa Cruz, drugs (though I’m clean right now), and Blue Dress, which is a feeling I get sometimes where there is no difference between outside and inside. I started writing songs under the name Almaden a year before I started curating The Story and changed my name to Mountainhood. I’ve seen 5 CDR releases so far on obscure labels in Finland and the UK, recently on Ecstatic Yod collective in the US, and forthcoming my “debut” on vinyl with Time Lag Records– two albums released at the same time with intricate and massively engrossing artwork packaging. Each edition will contain a handpainted rainbow by Nemo, the head of Time Lag.
“Delicate Rusticity” — San Francisco Guardian
mp3s: http://www.myspace.com/almadenfolk

.:. Headdress
I spent a lot of time talking to Caleb Coy lead singer of Headdress at the Ben Lomond Indian Summer festival in Ben Lomond, Northern California, last year, before he came to New York or was known in any fashion. It was an uncommonly real conversation then to happen among the bait-&-switch Bay Area folk scene mentality at the time. Caleb’s a really well-read guy from Texas who was able to praise the massive contributions to Americn music made by Flying Canyon. He’s done that drug that comes from frog poison, and his duo Headress is a really good stony slow-going song project of aetherial desert crooning blues-ragas, very focused and contained.
mp3s: http://www.myspace.com/totemsongs

.:.White Hills
are an awesome band that could well be headlining this benefit on quality alone, however they’re opening from a literary standpoint to illustrate a re-evolution from psychedelia forward into purer folk. I once read in a used bookstore music pamphlet the dubious but interesting claim that folk created psych. If that’s true, it’s time for psych to re-create folk. Tribal consciousness is nothing if but psychedelic by our modern terms– native drum beats and natural tunings that throw the mind into new pattern of consciousness. These modes of folk music evolved into “psych sounds of the 60s” and today is carried forth by the extremely loudspace-rock sound of White Hills. They’re good at what they do, a rarity in sound.
I like this derogatory affection from pitchfork: “If you’re going to play this kind of gritty garage-bred psychedelia, it stands to reason you should lay it on thick, but maximalism takes on a whole new meaning in White Hills’ “Glitter Glamour Atrocity”. Among its key ingredients: motorik-mined grooves, cool bass drone, raw-wire monotone riffery, liberally-applied space noises, the lupine hiss of overzealous wah-wah pedals, and sampled radio broadcasts of 9/11 prognosticators and finger-waggers. All of that over feedback squalls and the barest traces of threatening, spitting vocals– and that’s just a part of this eight-minute freakout. It should have been 45 minutes longer. I can’t think of a single excess they’ve left out, nor one they should have.”
mp3s: http://www.myspace.com/whitehills

About the Readers – curated by Byron Coley, who wrote the following…

byron coley, with pantomime help from gary panter. he may read or do something also.

louise landis levi — fantastic poet & translator (rene daumal, henri michaux, etc.), old pal of ira cohen’s. she will be reading a piece called “the deep diamond,” which is to be issued as a broadside by shivastan. she will be reading in with a “brilliant street poet” of her acquaintance — name unknown thus far.

angela jaeger — superb manhattan native poet, writer & musician. i believe she will be reading from her punk diaries.

wesley eisold & max morton. a pair evil provocateurs who will read a new collaborative work. wes runs heartworm press, the juanita & juan’s store in philadelphia and is the mastermind of the duo cold cave. morton is also based in philadelphia and has been publishing his sordid memoirs through heartworm.

robbie snyderman, a devotee of the theater of panic.

none of this would be possible without:

.:. Todd P
toddpnyc.com