* Page Loading - Please Wait *
Sorry, This Event is in the past!
Mega Bog is the fluid musical moniker of songwriter Erin Elizabeth Birgy, a Pacific Northwestern rodeo child with an unmistakable laugh, who was allegedly cursed upon conception. She has spent the last ten years channeling, capturing, and releasing her unique bouquet of fragrant, sci-fi pop experiments with a handful of bicoastal collaborators. Mega Bog has visited a significant portion of the Western world, frequently looping the USA and Europe to sing in tiny art spaces and haunted historical theaters alike. The live concerts are known for their emotional unpredictability. Onstage, Erin's current mood is amplified, for better or for worse; she is an honest and unflinching performer.
The title of Mega Bog's newest album Dolphineher fifth, and first for Paradise of Bachelorsis inspired by a myth that suggests that, as humankind evolved from sea creatures, some individuals chose not to leave the water and walk the earth, but rather to stay in the ocean and explore the darkness as dolphins. (The extra 'e' was added to take the word out of the everyday, translating it into a potential futuristic dialect.) Dolphine is an album for the swimming human shadow obscured by waves. The songwriting was inspired by Erin's own swim through a myriad of overwhelming emotions, including the ongoing mourning following the death of her childhood horse companion Rose, her navigation of the feelings and physicality of two abortions, and the hapless and shattering social, political, and environmental turmoil on the planet known as Earth.
In October of 2016, Erin took her dark sketches to the Outlier Inn studio in Woodridge, NY, with a passionate crew of deeply bonded musicians. Together, they arranged and executed these eleven dizzy pop songs, live, over a tight seven days. In addition to Birgy (vocals, guitar, piano), the lineup included Meg Duffy (guitar), Matt Bachmann (bass), Derek Baron (drums), James Krivchenia (engineering, percussion, effects), Aaron Otheim(synthesizers, piano), and Ash Rickli (guitar and vocals). Later, Will Murdoch (clarinet, synthesizers) and Zach Burba (synthesizers, bass) offered their own atmospheric overdubs from their home on the West Coast. Over the next year, Erin added to the tapestry with vocal contributions by Nick Hakim and Kalen Remy Walther, upright bass by Benjamin Murphy, textural guitar by Austin Jackson, and saxophone by Jeff Tobias, until she had successfully excavated each cold mystery with proper care and wonder. The completed sound is thick and inviting. Bellowing, breathless vocals, mystical lyrics with the presence of poetry and the intuitive logic of dreams, and promiscuous, sometimes dissonant chord structures swirl together, coalescing into hazy and hypnotic fantasies.
The songs of Dolphine are ablaze with jealousy, anger, and sadness as well as the powerful glow that comes from attempting to hold those feelings with care. Inspired by the poetry of Alice Notley, the novels of Ursula K. Le Guin, and the art of Ian Cheng, Birgy spins her manic web of emotions into beautiful, abstract future poems. With each lurid imagea stupid scorpion, an abdomen of small snakes, another picture of milk, foxes bloating up Eastern expressway shouldersErin dunks listeners deep into her subconscious, and it's up to us to surface, buoyant, and paddle through.
On album opener For the Old World, anguished affection and confusion bloom over lounge-music genre perversions, both ethereal and belligerent. On Diary of a Rose, Erin steps through her losses and growths to a continuous groove that crescendoes into melodic chaos and revelation. Truth in the Wild (the title is taken from a quote by Ian Cheng) speaks surreal and lonely images over soft percussion, classical guitars, and clarinet, pointing to influences like Joni Mitchell's jazz period and Laurie Anderson's 1989 record Strange Angels. Untitled (with 'C') was written for Philando Castile the day after his murder, and Fwee Again works through all of Dolphine's devotions instrumentally.
Ash Rickli wrote and sang the airy outlier Spit in the Eye of the Fire King, recorded on the porch of the studio with the wind chimes blowing. Between the album's recording sessions and its release, Ash's heart stopped unexpectedly during one of his live shows in Athens, Georgia. He was thirty. The tragedy, devastating to the many people who loved him, permeates the album. Ash sings:
I'm never afraid
I was born in the dark
And I'll die in the light with a tear in my mouth
To extinguish the spark that put light by itself
It's the one thing I could think to do to help
At the beginning of the sessions, Ash wrote a radio play based on his playful interpretation of Erin's tarot reading for herself. Titled Avenging Mind, it was intended as a companion piece to Dolphine. The recording remains unfinished. The following monologue is an excerpt:
That which is freely given Energy passing unseen from my inner eye exacting compassion and careful deliberate movements There! That sphere! Of course it's not an ordinary time machine; it's an incubation chamber. One that exists between planes, floating lucidly on the edge of dreams through the spires of Crystal City and beyond to the mountains. I can feel her forming now Athene Safe from the punishment of endless time and realized in a realm through which all things intersect and seem to dissolve.
Dolphine, too, inhabits that realm of realization.
The Brudenell is a lively and fun loving venue that embraces music and art under a wide and diverse umbrella that has no boundaries.
Our open music policy believes in freedom and creation and holds the belief that music and expression provide useful social interaction.
It is a community ‘non profitmaking’ venue, that holds charitable status, based in Leeds 6. The Brudenell Social Club is owned by its members, run by its members, for its members.
The Brudenell is most famous for hosting secret gigs for bands like Franz Ferdinand and the Kaiser Chiefs. However, it has been a centrepiece of the Leeds music scene for a number of years, and hosts gigs most nights of the week, which are put on by a variety of local promoters.
33 Queens Road,
Burley,
Leeds,
West Yorkshire,
England,
LS6 1NY.
0113 275 2411
Sorry, This Event is in the past!
Currently showing information provided by...
Show information provided by....instead
Whilst every effort goes into ensuring this event listing is accurate and up to date, always check with the venue before you travel.