present
WEDNESDAY AUGUST 7TH 8PM
$10 Suggested Donation
(pay what you can)
Shane Parish + Wendy Eisenberg
Wendy Eisenberg and Shane Parish are two sides of the same wishbone. Both inventive, spiny guitarists with deep roots in all genres, both veterans of critically acclaimed experimental rock bands, both published in Arcana VIII: Musicians on Music, edited by John Zorn (2017). They only just met in March 2018, while Wendy was on tour in Asheville. Hours after meeting, they recorded Nervous Systems (Verses Records 2019), a collection of radical standard-tuning guitar improvisations that explode the capacity of the instrument to accommodate fingers, pushing harmolodic boundaries, and displaying an uncanny psychic interplay that seems to evidence the fatefulness of this encounter. The music is confrontational and fluid, unapologetic and sensitive, contemporary, classical, polyrhythmic, folky, jazzy, shreddy, and punk as fuck. How fortuitous!
Wes Tirey
The canon of cosmic American songsters has long been marked by a wandering authenticity. Wes Tirey, a song and son from Ohio now in North Carolina, comes as true as the wind cutting down a city street on No Winners in the Blues. His wrought iron baritone vocal delivery, maybe a few too many grits, but this is no husky tumbleweed, it is a humid and sly tender night on the town. His impressionistic lyrics are glistening and dusty visions of a vivid past life lost in beer room jukebox stories; to say, “Wes is just a singer and these are just folk songs,” is to deny Wes a place around the campfire with the likes of other cosmic Americans like Ed Dorn, Fred Neil, Tom Robbins, Bill Callahan… not too afraid to be a little silly but totally wise and rascally like sparks cracklin’ or a flickering neon sign. Telling stories, maybe true, but ultimately belonging to this complicated American nightlife folklore. Tirey’s wonderful and curling acoustic guitar and narrative story song shavings remain the ground to stand on, lost among the atmospheric dusky accompaniment of ghostly electric guitar work from Shane Parish. A shuddering and sweet denim blue pocket full of stories and songs, a fingered pick worn sharp, a pen vivid and a voice low, boot the cobblestones and roll tired but trying in the alleys. A candid blues vision.