The rare phase-alignment of Diamond Mouth Surprise and S&S happened this past Saturday. Many thanks to the team at La Sala, everyone who attended, Dan Magers, Kate Brandt, In India, Pressed And, and Michaela Davies and her electroconvulsive string section (who lead off the small photo set below).
We are thrilled to announce our first collaboration with Diamond Mouth Surprise, a collective of curators that host a monthly night of sounds, images, and words in Brooklyn. Given our friendship, and the overlap of our worlds, this all just made sense.
With each event DMS offers prose as introduction. Here’s the start to August’s:
The Mystery of the Beach Raven Revealed?
The alignment of Diamond Mouth Surprise and Stadiums & Shrines occurs in two phases: 13-year and 17-year. It is rare for these phases to align, but that is precisely what is happening this Saturday. The last time it occurred, the same human-like figure appeared at every ritual observance, levitated upon a raft of light, and spat out thousands of birds, bats, and butterflies, before disappearing in a salty vapor that left all witnesses in a wash of physical and intellectual stimulation. Reports of this figure are consistent in two other ways: 1) the figure, who spoke many tongues, referred to itself only as Beach Raven, and 2) significant divergences in the testimonies from individual sites leave us with indeterminate descriptions of the being. Some theories as to the identity of Beach Raven include: Beach Raven is a ceremonial pseudonym for Ambrose Bierce, who is said to have survived for decades after disappearing in the desert in 1913 by drinking an elixir made in part from the blood of a species of lizard capable of regenerating limbs…. Continue reading, learn more about each artist, and RSVP at FB.
Back when the Pressed And guys drew on our roof, Imbue Up wasn’t much more than a zip file of unmastered tracks. On that summer afternoon though, Andrew and Matt shared a few of their ambitions, and sparkling among them was this: a video for each of the seven songs, all assigned with a deliberate lack of global direction. A flight of visual artists would respond (including Slow Motion alums BriAnna Olson, Wooden Lens, Stephanie Cafarella, LAND O’ GOSHEN, and Nathaniel Whitcomb). And if you’ve been riding along, you’ve seen four finished pieces circulate. Below are the final three, within the context of the entire set. Which, somewhat unpredictably, is how this is fully realized—a whole greater than the sum of its parts, or as Andrew Hamlet put it recently while presenting the project in a Chapel Hill theater:
“It appears that placing full trust in the music to direct the filmmakers was best. Totally organic—totally entropic. We have allowed the universe to work its wonders.”
Having learned that our friend Matt Jones, a Brooklyn/North Carolina artist who renders spectral sound as It is rain in my face., was also quite the illustrator, we thought: why not try and see how he, sees his music. After an excellent set at our show back in June, we jammed a bit on how this could be done. A few months later, it would happen on our roof, alongside Andrew Hamlet of ArnHao, who joins Matt in their project Pressed And. Victoria captured the sequence above (and like last time, Bean cameos). While many questions were asked, the two that dictated this ended up being, basically: what colors are It Is Rain?, and what colors are Pressed And?
Audio on display is the title track from his Wishbone EP with Absent Fever, available at bandcamp.