Lantern Gig Tonight!

Tonight at the Hong Kong Garden (Cecil B. Moore & Phillips) Lantern is playing with Hot Guts and Purling Hiss. It is the release show for the new Purling Hiss EP Lounge Lizards appearing on the label Mexican Summer.

Crazy Week Re-Cap - Lots of Videos

What a crazy week last week was. Lantern had three gigs including one that was a collaboritive set with Dirty Beaches in Brooklyn.

In addition to all that, we released a new tape on Night People - which can be purchased on their website, still waiting on artist copies - had an interview (a chopped and screwed interview, if you catch my drift) with Vice Magazine , and had a familiy from Louisiana tell me they were huge fans of mine and recorded themselves singing an Omon Ra II song.

Fortunately most of all this was recorded to video so let's start with the Lantern footage from the SOLD OUT first Unitarian show in Philadelphia. We played in the small side chapel, which was a beautiful space with a beautiful crowd - and the whole place seemed appropriate for a rock n' roll sermon. Dirty Beaches definitely excercised some demons.

This video is half our song "Get Out My Mind" and then all of "I Don't Know" both of which appear on our latest Night People release.



The footage was taken by Brent Wingen.

The following footage, also from the same show, is of Dirty Beaches and shows a new direction. Darker with even more of a hip hop influences. Combining the hysterical delivery of Screamin' Jay Hawkins with Alex's own dark, twisted, narritive. Track is called "Black Silk Stalkings"



This next video is of the Torres boys from Louisiana. Their father got in touch with me asking about lyrics to some Omon Ra II songs. He told me he sang Omon Ra II with his kids on the way to school. I couldn't really believe that some family actually listened to Omon Ra II on the way to school, but still I wrote them out the lyrics and explanations and the father replied.

“I really appreciate the lyrics and love the stories surrounding them. And yes my 4 kids (two boys two girls) are big music fans and love noisy rock and roll. I take requests from them on the way to school, this morning the girls wanted Alice Cooper, my youngest son requested Beck and my oldest one wanted to listen to “Those Egyptian Dudes, Omon Ra” (For a ten year-old he thinks he is a regular comedian). I’ll try to sneak a quick recording of them singing and send it to you.”

Well lo and behold the video surfaced. This was the most humbling, grateful things, to have experienced in my brief career - To have kids love your music. This generation is going to have some cool kids! This came at the right time because I was getting a little shell shocked from all the negative comments we recieved from our Vice article. Advice: Never read the comments. Here is the video!

The next stream of footage is from the Dirty Beaches/Lantern collab set in NYC on Friday the 13th! The show took place at Glasslands in Brooklyn. About a month ago Alex approached me about Lantern backing him up for this gig. We conversed a lot through email about the sound we wanted to go for but it was very much in the ether before we got together to see what it would sound like. Fortunately between the Philly and NYC shows we had a day off. We managed to get in a quick rehearsal Wednesday night and another in Friday afternoon in Bushwick. All the riffs we had we written in seconds and the show was a very vesceral experience. The way the songs went was not a typical verse chorus relationship - although that was definitely an archetype for the works. We used those ideas as platforms but let our physical reactions dictate the dynamics. We tried to keep things short - to avoid meandering 20 minute jams and we tried to give each other a lot of space even though we were playing rawkous free-proto punk. We played the four songs we wrote together and then the last, arguably best song, was completely improvised.

After the last song I broke all my strings. The crowd demanded more, so Alex gave me his guitar. While I was tuning the guitar, all of a sudden Emily and Sophie started rocking out. I was tuning up the B string and it had this spooky sound going up to the B It had this gothic western sound and I remember thinkings 'this is very Alex'. So I made that my riff and then Alex jumps into the audience. I thought the crowd might have been angry that Alex wasn't doing his regular gig but from my experience the sold out crowd seemed to love it. Unfortunately the last song from out set, the improvised 'encore', appears to not have surfaced, but there is a wonderful recording of the first songs. It makes a great bootleg. Who wants to put this out??

If that last song turns up, please let us know!

Alex is an extremely hard working musician and I am glad to see his hardwork is paying off. Before and after the show Alex conducted countless interviews, not to mention after we ran out of songs, the crowd still demanded more, so he went back out and performed a solo Dirty Beaches set, despite being extremely exhausted.

Alright I hope you enjoy the videos. Expect a Dirty Beaches/Lantern collab set again in the near future. And yah? Who wants to put out that bootleg???

-Z

Met Sean Lennon Last Night On The Streets of Fishtown

Met Sean Lennon on the streets of Fishtown last night with my friend Jon. He was in Philly playing a show. Nice guy. We talked about Eraserhead, briefly about Hasil Adkins, and how about the only thing I heard of his was a Soulfly (Max from Sepultura's new metal project) record he produced that I had as a teen. They did a song together that spoke about the loss of a father and a loss of a son. Max's son died, and Sean's father was murdered, obviously, so I guess it was from the heart. It is a pretty bad record, it was a really weird fusion of Nu-Metal, reggae, spirituality, psychedelic pop, and world music, from what I remember. I just listened to the above mention song, it is pretty cheesy, I have cringed thinking of my teenage self listening to these jams with my headphones in the back of my family's van. Anyways here is my bus pass which I got him to sign and the above mentioned song.

-Z

New City, New Friends, New Jams

Here is a recording of me and new bud Yosuke, he plays in Blackhawks as well as doing his own lysergic laced pop jams in BananaSymphony. He is in my new Philly crew. I met the bunch of them thanks to Dan (Cough Cool) who messaged me on myspace, he found the Lantern page on Dirty Beaches top friends, so thank Alex I guess!

Here is an instrumental jam we did the other night. We are hoping this will turn into a new project. Me on guitar and Yosuke on drums. Recorded by Yosuke. Cheers to Philadelphia.


zacharyfairbrother

Review on Weird Canada and move to Philadelphia.

I put out a few copies of this tape back in the spring for Wyrd Fest and the Obey Convention. I'll be making a few more once I get set up again here in Philly. If you want it in digital form though you can download it HERE.

As some of you may know I have left Canada for the "American Dream." The move has been interesting, exciting, and scary. Definitely a bit of culture shock. Philly at times looks and feels like Beirut (Or what I imagine it looks like as I have never been). I am staying in a beautiful loft with my partner's sister in Fishtown. We have a little spot in the corner till we get everything set up. I got a bank account after a bit of scare where I copied my social security number down wrong and it was looking like I wasn't going to get an account. I unfortunately had to go with Bank of America, as I was entering the bank there was a giant sign across the street that read, "I Hate Bank of America." It probably is an omen. I finally got a phone and each day is getting progressively better and I am slowly making friends. I am really worried about a job, I am not sure what to expect here and Philly's economy is the third worst in the country, seems you can't escape that. Today I am looking for more houses. I have been concentrating on writing more since I haven't had the opportunity, space, or privacy to write music. Lantern is sitting on about 20 songs write now and we'll have some upcoming releases, hopefully.


Some crappy pictures from my new AT&T cell phone.

My good friend and colleague Aaron Levin, the genius behind Weird Canada, kindly wrote some nice words of the I put out. I only made a few copies of this tape back in the spring for Wyrd Fest and the Obey Convention. I'll be making a few more once I get set up again here in Philly. Please get in touch if you would like a copy.

Best, and keep listening in!

-Z

From Weird Canada
With an unruly vocabulary for the avant-garde, the wild long-hair behind Omon Ra / Omon Ra II rips through your consciousness with six streams of free jazz, orchestral minimalism, and prepared minutiae. The unwieldy compositions are performed on-or-by everything (Arp2600, Dalhousie Brass Quintet, Saxophones, mixers, prepared piano, etc.) and mutate wildly in timbre; “Origins”‘ dense, synthetic dark-age scorches a sinusoidal path for the blissfully organic sequences; hear the strangely poppy Brass Quintet devastate “Prisms” and segue into the harrowing minimalia of “Long Tones and Lose Change.” It’s all a sharp reminder that underground reverberations are still produced in the dusty corners of academia. Bsc GRIP.