POSTPONED: Friday, March 13th: Susan Alcorn / Emily Robb

This event is postponed until  the fall.  Stay safe, everyone!

Friday, March 13th, 7:00pm
Open Mouth Records Presents:
Susan Alcorn & Emily Robb

Susan Alcorn
One of the world’s premiere exponents of her instrument, Susan Alcorn has taken the pedal steel guitar far beyond its traditional role in country music. Having first paid her dues in Texas country & western bands, she began to expand the vocabulary of her instrument through her study of 20th century classical music, visionary jazz, and world musics.

Though known as for her solo work, she has collaborated with numerous artists including Pauline Oliveros, Chris Cutler, the London Improvisors Orchestra, the Glasgow Improvisors Orchestra, Joe McPhee, Ken Vandermark, Nate Wooley, Ingrid Laubrock and Leila Bourdreuil, George Burtm Evan Parker, Michael Formanek, Zane Campbell, and Mary Halvorson among others.

In 2016, she was voted "Best Other Instrument" by the International Critics Poll. In 2017 she received the Baker Artist Award, and in 2018, along with saxophonist Joe McPhee, she was the recipient of the Instant Award in Improvised Music.

The UK Guardian writes, “As an improvisor and composer, Alcorn has proven to be visionary. Her pieces reveal the complexity of her instrument and her musical experience while never straying from a very direct, intense, and personal musical expression.”
Her latest release Soledad is available from Relative Pitch Records
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Emily Robb
a Philadelphia based musician who works predominantly with guitar. She has recently begun performing as a solo act. Her repetitive and primal song forms are created through loops, pedals, and basic vocal phrases. Emily collaborates with several other musicians and records at her studio in South Philadelphia, Suddenly Studios. Her previous bands include Lantern, Myrrias, Louie Louie, Storks and Cold Hands. Astute Palate, her band with David Nance, Dan Provenzano and Richie Charles, has an album forthcoming on the Richie Records/Petty Bunco label.

$10 suggested
byo drinks & snax
doors at 7, music at 8

Summer 2020 Open Mouth Records music series at Brickbat

Open Mouth Records has planned an excellent series of shows at the shop for this summer!  Keep an eye out for more information about each of these events.

Event: February 28th -- Ezra Feinberg / Jordan Perry / The Acoustic Lidders

Friday, February 28th, 7:00pm

The Acoustic Lidders
[It's the Heavy Lidders Quartet, but, you know, acoustic]
Jeffrey Alexander (Dire Wolves) guitar/vocal, Jesse Sheppard (Elkhorn) bass, Drew Gardner (Elkhorn) lead guitar, Scott Verrastro (Bardo Pond) drums.
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Jordan Perry Virginia-based guitarist
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Ezra Feinberg Brooklyn-based guitarist

$10 suggested / BYOB

Event: February 14th -- Matt Krefting / Rosali

Open Mouth Records Presents:
Matt Krefting & Rosali
Friday, February 14, 7:00pm

Matt Krefting
Matt Krefting is a writer, musician, and DJ based in Holyoke, Massachusetts. His writing has appeared in The Wire, The Huffington Post, Bull Tongue Review, and elsewhere. A member of Son of Earth, The Believers, and Idea Fire Company, he also creates his own solo music for cassettes. His music has been published by Open Mouth, Kye, and Ultra Eczema, among others.
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Rosali
Philadelphia based songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, Rosali, incorporates diverse musical styles from free improv, garage rock, country, pop, to folk-infused song-craft. Her second album, Trouble Anyway, is a vulnerable and powerful exploration of emotional narratives. She wrote the songs seeking empowerment by sharing openly on love, power, aging, suffering, confusion, self-doubt, and anger, the results are a full-bodied record that is at once sweeping and intimate. Following up her 2016 debut Out of Love (Siltbreeze), named one of the top 100 records of 2016 by Uncut Magazine, Trouble Anyway is a cohesive collection of lush, intimate rock songs, featuring her warm, natural vocals and powerful riffing and rhythm guitar, approaching the sublime.

For the Brickbat show, Rosali is joined by pedal steel player Zena Kay.

$10 suggested
byo drinks & snax
doors at 7, music at 8

Event: January 24th -- Daniel Higgs / Lauren Pakradooni

Open Mouth Records Presents:
Daniel Higgs and Lauren Pakradooni
Friday, January 24th, 7:00pm

Daniel Higgs
Higgs is known primarily for his work as the sole lyricist and frontman of the band Lungfish, a four-piece dedicated to charting, in this listener’s estimation, nothing short of the evolution of all species, known and unknown. That the band has undertaken this pursuit in the guise of a humble rock outfit, in the absence of any public relations fanfare, metanarrative, or manifesto has been enough to endear them to tens of thousands. They are enshrined as one of America’s last true folk bands, and Higgs anointed as a patron saint to artistic purity.

In recent years, Higgs has released a number of solo outings that can only be described as the ultimate in isolation, worlds away from the hypnotic, communal rock of his band. On Atomic Yggdrasil Tarot, Higgs weaves meditative, casually ruptured drones using acoustic and electric guitar, upright pianos, banjo and jew’s harp, recorded entirely at home on cassette recorder. He pairs the music with a series of paintings that call to mind religious iconography passed through the disfiguring surrealism of Miro.

Higgs has wedded his music and his visual art into a singular being, meant to be encountered as a conjuring force similar to that of the tarot experience. The yggdrasil is the great tree of Norse myth that connects all worlds of cosmology. Passing into Christian folklore, the tree is said to connect heaven and earth. In his relentless pursuit of the indivisible, Higgs travels up and down this spine and hatches a new transubstantiation of sound and image into life-form.
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Lauren Pakradooni

a Philadelphia-based visual artist and musician who produces and performs music under the moniker Tether in which she creates and manipulates cassette tape loops. Art multiples, repetition, and layering are a shared language between her visual and aural work. Her work emphasizes the slippage of form between the truly physical vestiges of ruins and the fantastical of half-rendered computer generated imagery.

$10 suggested
byo drinks & snax

Author Event: January 19th -- Our Flesh of Flames::Theodore A. Harris / Amiri Baraka

 Sunday, January 19th, 5:00pm
 Our Flesh of Flames::Theodore A. Harris / Amiri Baraka

collagist Theodore A. Harris will be presenting a recorded performance by the late poet Amiri Baraka reading his poem "Our Flesh of Flames" as composed in conjunction with Harris' collaged images.  Copies of Harris' book of collages with Baraka's poem will be available at the event for purchase. 

Our Flesh of Flames “Posed against an eerily iridescent orange sky,” and Harris’ collaged landscapes are filled with urban dystopia. Upside down capitols, distorted bank notes pose the reality of a society fettered by the cash nexus. Controversial critic and poet Amiri Baraka provides lyrical assault through his captions with his trademark humor and biting social commentary.

Theodore A. Harris is a collagist, poet, and has co-authored:
Our Flesh of Flames with Amiri Baraka
Malcolm X as Ideology with Fred Moten
i ran from it and was still in it and TRIPTYCH: Text by Amiri Baraka and Jack Hirschman.