Diamond Mouth Surprise and Stadiums & Shrines — Saturday, August 18th:
PRESSED AND
DAN MAGERS
IN INDIA
KATE BRANDT
MICHAELA DAVIES
8:00pm at LA SALA at Cantina Royal
FREE
The Mystery of the Beach Raven Revealed?
The alignment of Diamond Mouth Surprise and Stadiums & Shrines occurs in two phases: 13-year and 17-year. It is rare for these phases to align, but that is precisely what is happening this Saturday. The last time it occurred, the same human-like figure appeared at every ritual observance, levitated upon a raft of light, and spat out thousands of birds, bats, and butterflies, before disappearing in a salty vapor that left all witnesses in a wash of physical and intellectual stimulation. Reports of this figure are consistent in two other ways: 1) the figure, who spoke many tongues, referred to itself only as Beach Raven, and 2) significant divergences in the testimonies from individual sites leave us with indeterminate descriptions of the being.
Some theories as to the identity of Beach Raven include:
Beach Raven is a ceremonial pseudonym for Ambrose Bierce, who is said to have survived for decades after disappearing in the desert in 1913 by drinking an elixir made in part from the blood of a species of lizard capable of regenerating limbs.
Beach Raven is the reputedly immortal wandering priestess known to various spiritual traditions as The Maskmaker, The Maskwearer, The Holder of Masks, and The Many-Sleeved.
Beach Raven is a mishearing of B. Traven, author of the novels The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The Death Ship. Theories about the identity of B. Traven include: a socialist or anarchist German novelist from Schwiebus who disappeared into Mexico in the 1930s, a man named Berick Traven Torsvan (aka The Gringo) who owned a small restaurant near Acapulco, Ambrose Bierce, and Adolfo Lopez Mateos, president of Mexico from 1958-1964.
Beach Raven is Amelia Earhart, whose plane crashed in a remote part of the Amazon, where it was found by a tribe whose name loosely translates to the Mask-wearers. Earhart was nursed back to health and elevated to the status of “Angel of Reverse Luck,” which to the Mask-wearers is the second highest position humans can attain, after “Angel of Luck.”
Beach Raven was Diamond Mouth Surprise or Stadiums & Shrines or some simultaneous ethereal emanation of both Diamond Mouth Surprise and Stadiums & Shrines.
Join us this Saturday for the conjuring of Beach Raven through electrical shock rituals, vibratory incantation, and shamanistic utterances. You will be stimulated physically and intellectually, even if there is no salty vapor.
MICHAELA DAVIES maintains a multi-disciplinary practice across installation, painting, collage, sculpture, sound, music, performance and video. A musician, boxing instructor and psychology PhD, her work is informed by an interest in the role of both psychological and physical agency in creative processes. Michaela current work uses sonified seismic data to generate involuntary movement in performers via a custom–built electric muscle stimulation device. The work explores the ways in which data translates onto a performers’ body and how this can radicalize accepted notions of creative agency in performance. She has exhibited in group shows at Tortuga Gallery (Sydney, 2011, 2012), Little Fish Gallery (Sydney, 2008, 2007), Gallery 44 (Sydney, 2008, 2007, 2006), First Draft Gallery (Sydney, 2007), Space3 (Sydney, 2005) and has worked collaboratively on projects exhibited at Serial Space (Sydney, 2009), Kampung Festival (Sydney, 2008), Carriage Works (Sydney, 2008), Gang Festival (Indonesia, 2006) and Art Sydney (2006).
KATE BRANDT is a multimedia artist whose work is influenced by every day performances. She received her MFA from the Film, Video and New Genres Department at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2010 and is currently pursuing her Masters of Art in Art History and Criticism at Stony Brook University. Her work has been exhibited nationally, including New York, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia and Milwaukee, and in 2009 she received a Kodak Product Grant. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
DAN MAGERS’s first book of poems, Partyknife, is published by Birds, LLC. He is co-founder and co-editor of Sink Review, an online poetry journal, founder and editor of Immaculate Disciples Press, a handmade chapbook press focused on poetry and visual arts collaborations, as well as founder (with Paige Taggart) of the Tumblr Poets Touching Trees. He lives in Brooklyn.
IN INDIA is a continually evolving musical collective run by NYC-based sound collage artist Joseph Beers. It takes the form of a 3-piece on Saturday, which includes Brian Guterding and Robert Debois.
PRESSED AND is a collaboration between musicians Andrew Hamlet and Mat Jones. Representing time spent in both North Carolina and Brooklyn, the project is founded on a balance—the interplay of Andrew’s guitar and Mat’s vocals, all processed and manipulated through a field of collision, where meditative folk wanderings cross meteors of electronic.
