In celebration of the one year anniversary of Neighborhood Public Radio's first appearance at 21 Grand, NPR will broadcast a day long copyright infringement performance event called "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin". Working with electronic musicians as well as some of the usual stable of interviewers and performers Neighborhood Public Radio with 21 Grand will present an afternoon of artists who work with appropriated recordings, cover songs, manipulated texts, and other mechanical/electronic deformations of sound.
The event will take place on January 15th from 2pm - 10 pm. Doors at 2 show starts at 3. Admission is on a sliding scale from $5 to $15 and all proceeds benefit 21 Grand.
The current roster of performers includes:
Destroy Ape Technology, Blevin Blectum, Mr. Meridies,
Thomas Dimuzio, Michael Starve, and others to be confirmed.
Neighborhood Public Radio has been functioning as a temporary low power broadcaster since January of 2004 at art spaces in the Bay Area. Most recently in Southern Exposure's "The Way We Work" show that celebrated their 30th anniversary and was featured in local art critic Pamela Lee's top ten list for the year in the December issue of Art Forum. Neighborhood Public Radio operates as a critique of the tendency for National Public Radio to actually serve as what ex-NPR host Tavis Smiley referred to as "National Some of The Public Radio" (Salon.com, "It's not National Some-of-the-Public Radio", Dec.16,2004).
Neighborhood Public Radio invites local artists, musicians, and activists to broadcast on a new form of Public airwaves. Previous Neighborhood Public Radio participants have included the San Francisco Asian Women's Shelter, The DJ Project (SF), Kitchen Sink Magazine, Enemy Combatant Radio and a host of others artists, activists, and community groups.
Neighborhood Public radio's web site can be found at http://www.conceptualart.org/npr .
A schedule for the day can be found at
http://www.conceptualart.org/npr/archives/000017.html#more .
Destroy Ape Technology is not a band of monkeys, but highly-evolved apes experimenting with primitive human instruments, as well as others of superior ape manufacture, in the hopes of producing a Gesamtkunstwerk of noise.
Blevin Blectum is formerly one half of the Oakland-based digital duo Blectum From Blechdom and ex-aka-d84, bLevin bLectum now goes solo and/or with the audio/video band Sagan (with Ryan Junell, Wobbly, and Lesser). Continued electronics with a more oblique slant on the basic BFB sensation of things-not-quite-right-here, clanking, creaking grooves and anti-grooves as a coal-powered spacecraft from some steampunk parallel universe, puffing and straining as it struggles to reach escape velocity, chopped, time-stretched to the breaking/boiling point, generally fucked-with samples of everything
from hand-slapped leaves and antique broken Beatnik banks to ProTooledFree classic disembodied-blissful-transvestite-stand-up-comic vocals.
Mr. Meridies is the copyright-infringement-cover-name for Bob Boster, a Bay Area-based composer and electronic musician. Bob's work (generally presented as Mr. Meridies) can be found on Friction Media, Illegal Art/Seeland, and Cultural Labyrinth labels, as well as appearing in dance, theatre, and film.
Michael Starve is the host of the Starve Zone radio show, which offers a No Spin, No Bias, and No Nonsense take on current affairs and politics in the United States and abroad.
Samples of his work can be viewed at http://www.starve.org/starvezone.html .
Cost: $5-15 sliding scale