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June 2009 (6)
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Boy From Black Mountain wins IMA for Best Alt/Country Album
By Brian Carpenter on February 15, 2010 7:50 PM
Boy From Black Mountain won the 9th Independent Music Award for
Best Alt/Country Album. This year's judges included Tom Waits, Ricky Skaggs,
Aimee Mann, Judy Collins, and Suzanne Vega. See the winners in all the categories
here.
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Accolades for Boy From Black Mountain
By Brian Carpenter on January 23, 2010 9:27 AM
Boy From Black Mountain has been earning great reviews. PopMatters
writes "Beat Circus has provided one of the highs of the year."
The Boston
Phoenix raves "Boy From Black Mounain is the prettiest
darn dark Americana record in recent memory." The Boston Herald ranks Boy From Black Mountain in their top 10 of 2009. The album has also been nominated for Best Alt-Country Album by the Independent Music Awards. Boy From Black Mountain
is now available in our online STORE.
All profits from our online store go directly to the artist!
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Ghost Train Orchestra mixing
By Brian Carpenter on January 23, 2010 9:24 AM
Last November I finally recorded the Ghost Train Orchestra with Danny Blume at Avatar Studios. We're in the middle of mixing this record now and I'm excited about it. Ten-piece orchestra playing the music of late 1920s Chicago and Harlem. Hope to have it mastered by end of March and then we'll be looking for a home for it. Stay tuned...
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Beat Circus This Weekend
By Brian Carpenter on October 23, 2009 7:49 AM
Get
tickets now for Saturday night at Middle East Upstairs! We'll be
performing several new songs with a revamped instrumentation plus a few
favorites from our latest cd Boy From Black Mountain. This will most likely be our last Boston-area show of the year. The Boston Herald wrote a story on the band which came out today here.
On this show is the incredible Blood Warrior from
Brooklyn, led by O'Death front man Greg Jamie. This band must be seen
to be believed. Compelling songs featuring Greg's signature voice
combined gorgeous and haunting vocal harmonies. Also performing are
two of our favorite Boston bands, Mr. Sister, featuring Amelia Emmet and Mike Fiore (Faces on Film), and Guillermo Sexo, a dark Latin-tinged psych rock quartet also from Boston.
Also, tune into WZBC 90.3FM this Friday at 5PM EST for a live set by Guillermo Sexo followed by an interview at 6:20 with Beat Circus. You can win free tickets by calling in at 617-552-4686 or IM'ing wzbcdj. Tickets on sale at the Middle East Box Office and through ticketmaster here.
We recommend Boy From Black Mountain on
CD! The CD was mastered by the great Fred Kevorkian at Avatar Studios
in NYC and the booklet features illustrations by the very great Carson Ellis and gorgeous photography by Amy Higgins, and lyrics to all of the songs. The Boston Phoenix raves "Boy From Black Mountain is the prettiest darn dark Americana record in recent memory". Purchases from our online store go directly to the band!
http://www.beatcircus.net/
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A Weird American Gothic Story - Part 2: A Boy From Black Mountain
By Brian Carpenter on October 7, 2009 9:44 AM
Boy From Black Mountain began as a way of continuing a trilogy of
"Weird American Gothic" albums began in 2006 with Dreamland. If
Dreamland used the mythologies of the American circus as its backdrop,
Boy From Black Mountain used Southern Gothic mythos and storytelling,
inspired by my father's life growing up as a watermelon farmer in the
rural Bible Belt. As so often happens, what I set out to do was only a
small part of what I actually ended up doing. In December of that year
my son was diagnosed with autism. I stopped writing music for a year.
And over the next 18 months Caroline and I spent our days helping our
son overcome many obstacles.
I. Clouds Moving In
We saw early symptoms such as stacking and repetition but several trips
to so-called "experts" did not yield a diagnosis. He wasn't talking
much at age 2, either, but when he started the temper tantrums when his
routine changed, we knew there was a serious problem. While Caroline
was reading every book under the sun about autism, I was writing music
in an attempt to release what I was feeling and document the phases of
what we went through from diagnosis to recovery. I'll never forget
coming home one Halloween night and seeing all of these happy families
walking their kids along the streets. And then getting home and seeing
my son fast asleep, in his Superman cape, and asking Caroline what
happened. They walked less than half a block and he started screaming
because he wanted to go a different way. There was nothing she could
do, he was just terrified and upset. And I just broke down because I
wanted him to experience Halloween like other children were
experiencing it, but mostly because I knew something was very, very
wrong.
II. The Sound And The Fury
I was distraught and I felt a lot of dread every day coming home to a
screaming child who couldn't talk with me, who couldn't explain to me
how he was feeling or what he was so terrified of. I've told Caroline
(years later) I remember walking up to the house at night and hearing
his screams from outside on the sidewalk, and I would stop at the fence
and look up, my briefcase in hand, the street light shining down on me.
And I often felt like Father Merrin in The Exorcist coming home every
night. "Saturn Song" came out of seeing my son getting teased on the
playground and wondering why the parents of these snotty, spoiled
little Cambridge brats didn't step in to do something. I was so angry
at just about everyone.
III. The Course Of The River
After finally getting the diagnosis of austim in December 2006, we
began battling with the public school system to get services. In 2007
our son moved into an ABA classroom in Cambridge taught by Moira
McNabb, who we are convinced is either an angel, some kind of miracle
healer, or just one of the best darn preschool teachers for special
needs kids around. She was able to bring out his personality in a way
other teachers could not. She went into his world, and if he was
nervous about something she got silly with him to make him laugh. With
Moira's help, an intensive schedule of ABA, and of course one-on-one
with Caroline and me, he slowly started talking and making eye contact
and he was on his way to recovery.
IV. Boy From Black Mountain
After he overcame many of the obstacles, I was able to write about the
experience through some of the songs on this album. Black Mountain (a
mountain and progressive school in North Carolina) became a metaphor
for autism. Today my son is the most gregarious and creative little
social butterfly. He loves to read books and never stops talking about
all of his creations and stories and friends. His repetitive behavior
is gone and he never screams anymore. His friends are very important to
him. "Boy From Black Mountain" is a love song to my son, a boy with a
hyper-creative mind whose obstacles disappear in his dreams and whose
exceptions provide a unique path to fulfill his dreams.
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A Weird American Gothic Story - Part 1: The Concept Album
By Brian Carpenter on September 27, 2009 9:20 PM
In an interview recently discussing his album Berlin, Lou Reed called the concept album "the kiss of death". Berlin was released in 1973. It was Lou Reed's third album, after the very successful Transformer, an upbeat glam-rock record. In comparison, Berlin was seen as a downer, a collection of songs about jealousy, anger, and loss centered around a couple of drug addicts, Jim and Caroline. The album received generally scathing reviews, most infamously from Rolling Stone, calling it "a disaster...his last shot at a once-promising career. Goodbye, Lou." In 2006, Reed revisited Berlin with a series of shows at St. Ann's warehouse. The live concert was filmed and edited with dramatic footage by Julian Schnabel and the result is one of the most emotionally charged concert films in recent memory. It's stunning, a huge production by Bob Ezrin and Hal Willner, with a children's choir, strings, brass, Antony and Sharon Jones singing backup vocals. So why did critics hate this record so much? Because it was heavily arranged? Because somehow big arrangements are contrary to good ol' rock and roll? Because it was a downer? Lou himself is mystified by it, if you compare the story to say, Hamlet, where everyone dies in the end. Or maybe it got the reception it did because it was a concept album. Does a concept album somehow imply to audiences that the songs can't stand up on their own?
I'll go on record here and say this. I'm not at all sure what the point of releasing an album is if there is no concept behind it. An album needs cohesion. Otherwise why not just release independent singles? Especially in this day and age where everything seems to be downloaded anyway. Of course, there are many different ways to provide cohesion between songs. Consistent instrumentation, consistent characters, consistent themes...and some combination of those or all of the above makes a concept.
The albums which have had the biggest impact on my life either emotionally, intellectually, or musically have all been conceptual. John Zorn's The Big Gundown, Tom Waits' The Black Rider, and Henry Threadgill's Too Much Sugar For A Dime all affected my musical mind in a big way, opening up doors in terms of sound, instrumentation, and writing. While not an album, Philip Glass and Robert Wilson's opera Einstein on the Beach was a vastly ambitious concept which paid off. The opera refers to Einstein the historical figure and his breakthroughs through a series of 9 20-minute scenes with textual contributions by Christopher Knowles, an autistic poet with a long-standing collaboration with Wilson. Nick Cave's The Boatman's Call is another album which affected me in a big way and we know those songs are all about Polly Harvey. Funny that Nick Cave has often dismissed this album, too, in interviews: "I was making a big heroic melodrama out of a bog-standard rejection by a woman". Beat Circus alum Alec K. Redfearn released one of the most haunting and beautiful albums I've heard in years, The Blind Spot, a concept album dedicated to love ones lost to drug overdose. I'm not sure it's one of his best-selling albums but it's his best, in my mind. Dirty Projectors have been releasing a string of albums with heavily-loaded concepts behind them, including Rise Above a couple years back, an album of Black Flag covers half-remembered by leader Dave Longstreth. And I really enjoyed his previous album The Getty Address, a "glitch opera" (you have to hear it to understand what that means) about musician Don Henley (I still don't get that part).
There's a reason why musicians shy away from marking their albums as concept albums. How many people shrugged off Berlin without listening critically because they read it was about a couple of drug addicts and ended in a suicide? Or maybe they listened but if they knew the story beforehand, it was always there coloring their experience. And how many people were busy asking Dave about Black Flag after Rise Above was released without remarking on how completely unique the musical vision behind his new album was. Hell, you could barely even call his interpretations covers at all. I'm saying the concept often gets in the way of the songs. It's all about the songs, after all. The concepts are really just frameworks for songwriting and compositions. And if the songs don't hold up, the concept is meaningless.
One could argue that all albums are by their very nature concept albums. And as Eric Penna of Ketman wrote to me recently, long live the album. Who knows how long albums are going to be around for? And if albums are approaching extinction, I guess concept albums must be just about dead and gone, now, right?
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Boy From Black Mountain is here
By Brian Carpenter on September 16, 2009 8:00 PM
The new Beat Circus album Boy From Black Mountain is now available in our online
STORE. Boy From Black Mountain is a
collection of personal songs about children, fatherhood, dreams, lost love,
lust, revenge, and redemption. The songs are inspired by songwriter Brian
Carpenter's son, stories handed down from his family in the rural Bible
Belt, and the Southern Gothic literature of Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner,
and Eudora Welty.
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Interview on East Village Radio Saturday August 29th
By Brian Carpenter on August 28, 2009 6:57 AM
Tune in Saturday night August
29th at 10PM EST to East Village Radio. I'll be joining host Devon Levins
on his show Morricone Youth to play music from Dreamland, Boy From Black
Mountain, plus some rarities. I'll also be playing some of my favorite
soundtracks. You can listen to the online stream here.
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Beat Circus CD release show tickets on sale Friday
By Brian Carpenter on July 19, 2009 8:51 PM
I'm very excited to announce an epic bill
for our Boston CD release show. This show marks a reunion with our beloved REVEREND GLASSEYE (relocated from Boston to Austin two years ago) who will debuting a new band and playing new songs as well as some of the older material. In addition, the astounding 30-piece circus punk marching band from Chicago MUCCA
PAZZA, Boston supergroup KETMAN,
and singer/multi-instrumentalist/phenomenon LARKIN
GRIMM (Young God Records) all help us release our third full-length
Boy From Black Mountain (Cuneiform Records) on Friday September
11 at the Middle East Downstairs in Cambridge MA. And we've scheduled the cd release show 2 weeks in advance of the actual street date so you can get your hands on the album early!
Tickets go on sale Friday July 24th in person at the Middle
East Box Office (1-7pm every day) and at all Ticketmaster locations. Get
tickets soon as these are going to go quickly! More information on the SHOWS
page.
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The Old, Weird America at DeCordova
By Brian Carpenter on July 19, 2009 7:24 AM
Paran of Beat Circus recently told me about an exhibit at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln called "The Old, Weird America". Their website states it is "the first museum exhibition to explore the widespread resurgence of
folk imagery and mythic history in recent art from the United States." The title was borrowed from Greil Marcus' 1997 book about the influence of folk music on Bob Dylan and the Band's album "The Basement Tapes". Part of the exhibit showcased Harry Smith's "Anthology of Folk Music" with the original liner notes and a listening booth.
I found some of the works to be rather heavy-handed and preachy, unsubtle lashing out at the Iraq War and the religious right. Other pieces, such as Deborah Grant's acrylic on birch panel tiles "Where Good Darkies Go" were exceptional pieces of Americana storytelling.
Kara Walker's film "8 Possible Beginnings or: The Creation of African-America" was showing in a dark room with a sign out front warning adults with children about "controversial themes and explicit subject matter". We brought Alexander along and this woman walking out turns to me as we're about to walk in, "This is *really* explicit". She seemed rather horrified by it. I'm often as interested in people's reactions to the work as I am the work itself. There was an elderly couple in there and about halfway through one of the films the man turns to the woman and says "I'm ready to go when you are". Much to his dismay, she says "I want to see the rest of it."
 The film was in 8 parts. I didn't make it through all 8 parts as Alexander was getting restless, but I saw a challenging and thought-provoking comment on race stereotypes in America, all within Walker's surreal, dreamlike world of black cut-paper siluhouettes. It was cast in the spirit of dark Southern Gothic storytelling with late 1920s jazz such as King Oliver's "Call of the Freaks" playing throughout. Recently I'd been reading a lot about 1920s jazz and I couldn't help finding parallels between this and Leroi Jones's "Blues People: Negro Music in White America" as I was watching it.
For those in the Boston area, I'd recommend seeing the exhibit. It runs through September 7th; more information at the DeCordova website.
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