The Bowery Presents

The Bowery Presents upcoming shows

Monotonix

Th’ Legendary Shack Shakers / Old Time Relijun / Skeletonbreath

Venue:
Brooklyn Bowl
Date:
Wed 4/14
Notes:
21+
Doors: 6:00 PM / Show: 9:00 PM
$12 advance / $12 day of show
Tickets
Monotonix
official website
myspace
Monotonix are singer Ami Shalev, guitarist Yonatan Gat and drummer Haggai Fershtman. They hail from Tel Aviv, a city not necessarily famous for its rock n roll scene They all knew each other and wanted to do something together. When their previous bands started breaking up, it felt like the right time, and Monotonix started playing together in November 2005. Rock and roll? It's not really part of the culture over there. Most of the music there draws from Russian, Greek, Arab and Mediterranean folk; contemporary Israeli music is a combination of cheap 80's pop, Mediterranean licks and soft rock.

According to Yonatan, most rock shows there still occur in front of a seated audience eating hummus. Monotonix didn't really like that. They wanted to do the complete opposite from what was going around them. Their inspiration is the raw energy and awesomeness of all the great classic rock bands, vintage pop and indie rock.

That's how the Monotonix style of performance started, and since the first time they did it in Tel Aviv, the trio, together, on the floor among the people, it's been a party every night. But in Israel, the party was often too loud and wild for their own good. After finding themselves banned from half of the venues in the country, and having power shut down and cops called on them, they got tired of listening to their audience boo the promoters. So they decided to fly a guitar amp and some drums to New York. They started their first tour of the East Coast not knowing what to expect in the U.S.A. Getting to know themselves and what they love about music and communicating with audiences all over again, they found the show had as much of a liberating effect on audiences around the world as it did on the band themselves.

Monotonix's book of show stories is becoming epic. There's the guy in Knoxville who set himself on fire. Then there's the 55 year old woman in Haarlem, Netherlands who drank beer out of Ami's shoe. And in Richmond, VA the audience lifted the entire band in the air, including the drums and guitar amp, for the last song of the set. They've been playing in front of similarly spirited audiences for a year and a half nonstop, playing nearly 300 shows in the United States and Europe in that time. They plan to be on the road for the majority of 2008, getting off to a fast start with two full months of shows all around America between February and April. Monotonix tried to record their songs a couple of times in Israel (for the couple of days they were actually home!) but were never satisfied. During their last tour they thought that if they tried to record in a studio in the States after playing all those shows, they might be able to pull it off. And pull it off they have with their first Drag City EP, Body Language.

Addendum: Please note that since the release of the Body Language EP, Haggai Fershtman has replaced Ron Shimoni as the drummer for Monotonix
Th\' Legendary Shack Shakers
official website
myspace
The Legendary Shack Shakers' hell-for-leather roadshow has earned quite a name for itself with its unique brand of Southern Gothic that is all-at-once irreverent, revisionist, dangerous, and fun. Led by their wildly charismatic frontman/blues-harpist, J.D. Wilkes, the Shack Shakers are a four-man wrecking crew whose explosive interpretations of the blues, punk, rock and country have made fans and critics into true believers.

With the recent addition of former Jesus Lizard guitarist Duane Denison (Hank III/Tomahawk) and drumming wunderkind, Brett Whitacre, the Legendary Shack Shakers have quickly become known for providing some of the best entertainment (live or otherwise) that you can get for your hard earned money.

As a budding filmmaker, 'Colonel' J.D. has recently made his directorial debut with the indie documentary 'Seven Signs.' The film depicts a struggling Appalachian and Delta culture that survives to this day, despite heavy modernization. The film has won both critical acclaim and even the 'Best Featurette' trophy at Philadelphia's Backseat Film Festival, before moving on to Cannes.

Described as '...the last great Rock and Roll frontman' by Jello Biafra (of the Dead Kennedys), Shack Shakers front man J.D. Wilkes began yelpin' the blues through a ham radio microphone at his boyhood home of Paducah, Kentucky...a short farmer's blow away from where his future bassist Mark Robertson was cutting his teeth on punk rock and gospel music in Nashville, Tennessee. When their paths crossed a few years later in the lawless honky tonks of Music City's Lower Broadway scene, they found their individuated styles and common interests meshed. That's when the like-minded, red-headed musical misfits began their crusade.

For the uninitiated, the band's debauched live show is the necessary counterpart to their hard-hitting recordings. Hillbilly royalty, Hank Williams III once said after touring with them that it was 'like having SLAYER open up for you every night,' and called J.D. Wilkes and his crew, 'the best damn front man and band in America.' On stage, J.D. Wilkes is like a mad southern preacher with a bible in one hand and a glass of strychnine in the other. Meshing Pentecostal themes with pained lyrics and show-stopping moves that draw comparisons to Tom Waits and the grotesque facial and bodily contortions of Iggy Pop, the band has developed a live show like none other.

Having toured both the U.S and Europe relentlessly for the past two years, the word of mouth on the live Shack Shakers experience is so strong that it reached the likes of Robert Plant, who made it a priority to see them at the 2005 SXSW Music Festival in Austin, TX. One performance was all it took for Plant to join the converted. After seeing the band's show at SXSW, Plant invited the Shack*Shakers to support him on his Fall '05 European tour. 'It's F***ing Great,' said Robert Plant on the Legendary Shack Shakers.

'We try to tap into basic primal instincts,' said Wilkes. 'Rock 'n' roll is a cathartic release. Anything that doesn't realize that bestial nature isn't rock 'n' roll.'

The band is also well known for 'The CB Song', a.k.a: the soundbed for the long-running 'Sunglasses' Geico commercial, featuring the famous gecko spokeslizard. The song was even listed by author Stephen King as one of his top five favorite tunes in a 2008 article in Entertainment Weekly.

In addition to his musical accolades, J.D. Wilkes has also been recognized as an accomplished illustrator and painter whose works further the band's mission of celebrating and honoring the tradition of the American south. Alarm Magazine recently described him as the 'Ambassador of Genuine Traditional Southern Culture' and compared his unique storytelling abilities to that of other Southern voices such as William Faulkner, Johnny Cash and Muddy Waters.
Old Time Relijun
myspace
"In the ancient of days, we gathered up from the mud."

CONFRONTATIONAL DANCE MUSIC TAKES OVER THE WORLD!
The End of Oppression!


Olympia, Washington. New Year's Day, 1995. A dark and smelly basement. Three young musicians gather to tackle the vast songbook of Arrington de Dionyso. They had heard his self-recorded cassettes. The songs were wild and lovely. Arrington (the rebellious son of Methodist ministers) played every instrument with the soul of an outsider artist who didn't know any better.

The original trio was brought together for one show. You know ­ just to see what would happen. They called themselves Old Time Relijun.

Arrington played a $20 guitar and a beat up bass clarinet. He sang with a mixture of piss and vinegar that exploded with naive charisma. Bryce Panic harassed the drums. Aaron Hartman beat on a two-string upright bass with a microphone taped to its bridge. They communicated with the clairvoyance of long-married ninjas.

That first show, everything went red: strings broke, the bass was a solid mass of feedback, the PA was blown. They used Arrington's songs as a template to meld shock-ritual with a mad-tea-party-dance-vibe. They barely noticed the college kids in full Riot Grrrl gear screaming, they had no idea that punkers and hippies were dancing together. Something awful happened that night.

A band was born.

Soon they were playing full sets to friends and taste-making Olympia hipsters alike. They played every show they could ­ whether or not they were on the bill. They developed the kind of intuitive free-jazz rapport most bands could only dream of.

In 1996, OTR recorded their first album, "Songbook Volume One". They released it themselves, financing the production by tricking a friend out of his meager inheritance. The CD was packaged in stolen popcorn bags.

In 1997, Calvin Johnson invited the band to record a song for the "Selector Dub Narcotic" compilation for his K Records label. From there, a beautiful relationship was born.

After Bryce left to pursue a life of dance and yoga in India, one of the band's younger fans, Phil Elvrum, asked if he could join. He moved to Olympia, and OTR's second of many lives began. Phil's caveman beats and undeniable production savvy helped launch the first three Relijun albums K would release. "Uterus and Fire" (1999), was a bombastic exercise in recording in the red. "La Sirena de Pecera" (2000) was a one-night multilingual wonder, acting as a coda to "Uterus'"unyielding momentum. Then came the band's first true masterwork, "Witchcraft Rebellion" (2001), an album as deep and bizarre as anything you'll find on your record shelf. A retelling of the first chapters of Genesis from the serpent's point of view.

After a couple U.S. and European tours, Phil decided to focus his energy on his recording projects and his own band, the Microphones. Old Time Relijun continued in a variety of mutated formations, with various lost souls sitting behind the drum set.

"As above, so below"

The group experienced a brief lull in activity as Arrington began a period of vagabonding that would take him hitch-hiking across the United States and back and forth between Italy, France, and Argentina. A compilation of unreleased oddities, "Varieties of Religious Experience", was released in 2003, and both Arrington and Aaron had time to reevaluate the direction their band would take.

During his travels, Arrington composed an outline for what would become "The Lost Light Trilogy". The first two installments, Lost Light (2003) and 2012 (2005), recorded with the help of drummers Rives Elliot and Jamie Peterson, respectively, saw extensive touring, a wider audience for the band, as well as high praise from critics world wide.

Arrington likes to say, "Every song on each album has a correspondence to other songs, whether musically or lyrically; with exponentially as a spatial archetype. Each song is like a small shard of a larger mirror - so that each piece reflects another piece, much in the way a cubist painting reflects many perspectives of the same object at once."

The trilogy moves like an odyssey which blurs the lines between dream and life - placing the entire Universe within the expansive structure of three Old Time Relijun albums.

Now based in Portland, Oregon, Old Time Relijun have re-invented themselves again. The final installment of the trilogy, Catharsis in Crisis, is the culmination of twelve years of deceptively untutored refinement. With new members Germaine Baca (drums) and Benjamin Hartman (saxophones), Old Time Relijun keeps charting new territories in the nether regions between the Ancient World and the Invisible New.

These songs are at once autobiography, dream diary, and new myth - politically and sexually charged manifestos for alchemical revolution from a fully realized band, whose conceptual roots dig down as deep as their music. Old Time Relijun songs embrace life in all its joy and terror- birth, death, awareness, experience, love. Live or recorded, they don't shy away from confronting the monsters that lurk deep in the shadows. At the same time, we hear a band that takes sheer vibrant delight in playing and being alive.
skeletonbreath
official website
myspace
Skeletonbreath is an instrumental violin/bass/drums trio. They are very loud.
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