Event: April 1, 2022 -- Samara Lubelski / Ken Brenninger

 

 

 

Open Mouth Records Presents:
Samara Lubelski & Ken Brenninger

Friday, April 1st, 2022

 

We are very pleased to announce the triumphant return of Bill Nace's Open Mouth Records Music Series at Brickbat!

 

Samara Lubelski is a singer, songwriter, multi instrumentalist (violinist, guitarist and bassist) improviser and engineer. She has been a member of numerous bands, including Of a Mesh, The Salmon Skin, Pacer, The Sonora Pine, Hall of Fame, The Tower Recordings, Metal Mountains and Chelsea Light Moving. Lubelski is a prolific guest musician, performing (predominantly on violin and occasionally on bass) on dozens of recordings by artists such as The Fiery Furnaces, White Magic, Thurston Moore, God Is My Co-Pilot, Jackie-O Motherfucker, Sightings and MV & EE.  

 

Ken Brenninger is a fierce guitar slinger who spent time in bands Fully Glazed and Storks, before joining up with Jesse Sheppard from Elkhorn and Dave Siebert from Jackie O Motherfucker to form the sludgy acid hurricane that is Blues Ambush. Brenninger also works at the famed Philadelphia Record Exchange!

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

Events Calendar March 2022 and beyond!

 We did it, we finally got a real calendar for our site!

You can find all our events HERE

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

Event: January 11th -- Patrick Holmes / Chris Forsyth

 Saturday, January 11th, 7:00pm
Open Mouth Records presents solo sets from
Patrick Holmes and Chris Forsyth

$10 suggested donation, BYOB & snax!

Patrick Holmes -- Originally from Austin, TX he started on electric bass as a teenager, switching over to the clarinet at age 24. He's been in New York for the past twenty years, working diligently to refine a voice and approach to the clarinet that is uniquely his own. He has studied with Connie Crothers and Sabir Mateen and he has performed with Ryan Sawyer, Daniel Carter, Masami Tomihisa, Axel Dörner and many many more. 

Chris Forsyth -- Philly's own lauded guitarist and bandleader whose widescreen art-rock, fusing taut compositions and mercurial improvisations, has earned him a reputation as one of the most distinctive and critically acclaimed guitarists working today. 

Event: December 20th -- Luke Stewart / Madam Data

Open Mouth Presents:
Luke Stewart  and Madam data
at Brickbat Books
Friday, December 20th, 7:00pm
$10 suggested -- byob/snax
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Luke Stewart is a DC/NYC-based musician and organizer of important musical presentations. He also has a presence in the national and international professional music community. He was profiled in the Washington Post in early 2017 as “holding down the jazz scene,” selected as “Best Musical Omnivore” in the Washington City Paper’s 2017 “Best of DC,” chosen as “Jazz Artist of the Year” for 2017 in the District Now, and in the 2014 People Issue of the Washington City Paper as a “Jazz Revolutionary,” citing his multi-faceted cultural activities throughout DC. In DC his regular ensembles include experimental jazz trio Heart of the Ghost, Low Ways Quartet featuring guitarist Anthony Pirog, and experimental rock duo Blacks’ Myths.  As a solo artist, he has been compiling a series of improvisational sound structures for Upright Bass and Amplifier, utilizing the resonant qualities of the instrument to explore real-time harmonic and melodic possibilities. He has performed at many of Washington’s high-profile venues including the Kennedy Center, the Atlas Performing Arts Center, Smithsonian Portrait Gallery, 9:30 Club, Black Cat, and many others throughout DC’s storied DIY community. Luke is also a presence in the greater community of Creative Musicians, with regular multi-city ensembles including Irreversible Entanglements featuring Moor Mother, James Brandon Lewis Trio, Heroes are Gang Leaders, Ancestral Duo, and has performed in a myriad of other notable collaborations. He has been a featured artist at the Vision Festival, Sonic Circuits Festival of Experimental Music, High Zero Festival of Experimental Improvised Music, Fields Festival, Philadelphia Free Form Festival, Forward Festival, Furious Flower Poetry Festival, and has toured abroad at North Sea Jazz Festival, Toulouse Jazz Festival, Vitoria Jazz Festival, Belgrade Jazz Festival, and Rotterdam Jazz Festival. As a scholar/performer, he has performed and lectured at Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, Medgar Evers College, George Mason University, Wayne State University, University of Montana, New Mexico State University, and the University of South Carolina. He holds a BA in International Studies and a BA in Audio Production from American University, and an MA in Arts Management and Entrepreneurship from the New School.

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Ada Adhiyatma is a musician who explores machine interfaces and the embodied idea of distance. Working with handmade computer programs, field recordings and old samplers, they fantasize about sound as a way to echolocate spaces defined by separations, the trauma of dislocation, the impossibility of empathy. Ada's performance personas in Philadelphia include the apocalyptic insect noise purveyor Madam Data, and various component identities of sci fi noise-thrash quintet OOLOI and the environmental improvisation duo 'place'. They also produce a podcast of discarded sound called The Floating World.

Ada's pronouns are they / them / theirs and they sit at the crossroads of certain disabilities and certain queernesses, often unsure what they're doing there.

(Open Mouth = Bill Nace)

Event: December 17th -- Carol Cleveland Sings & Pairdown

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Join us Tuesday, December 17th at Brickbat for a night of music with Carol Cleveland Sings and Pairdown.

$8-10 suggested donation, byob & snax

Event: November 19th -- Bill Direen::A Memory of Others

Brickbat is thrilled to welcome New Zealand musician and writer Bill Direen (The Bilders) to the shop!

In Bill's own words:  "I am a New Zealand musician, who has toured and released music since the early 80s, touring solo in November to celebrate a double-LP titled Bill Direen A Memory of Others , soundtrack of a documentary about me. The double LP was released this month by Sophomore Lounge of the USA. http://sophomoreloungerecords.com/amemoryofothers.html. You will note that the liner notes, quoted on that page, were written by esteemed rock journalist Byron Coley.
My music is a balance of rock-informed electric guitar and soft electric ballads.  Here is a trailer for the documentary which is backed by a quieter ballad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hPBDIGV8fc

On stage, I play electric guitar and electronic keyboards. I sing. I also read three brief extracts from poetic works. A percussionist (Chris Davis) accompanies me on a last few songs. "

Other performers TBA very soon!

$10 admission -- BYOB and snax

Event: Alexander and Jordan Burgis/Jesse Sheppard Duo

Sunday, November 10th at 7:00pm
Join us for an evening of good tunes and warm vibes with:

ALEXANDER (David Shapiro of CT's Headroom).
https://davidalexanderguitars.bandcamp.com/album/the-pale-light-over-the-dark-hills-2
and
Jordan Burgis (Honey Radar) / Jesse Sheppard (Elkhorn) Duo

Suggested donation $10, byo drinks and snacks.