The New Media Project and The Other Side of Life are proud to present:

NATHAN BOWLES/SCOTT VERRASTRO DUO (Members of Pelt, The Black Twig Pickers, and Kohoutek; from Blacksburg, Virginia and Philadelphia, PA)
mAAs (Louisville, KY; duo of Tim Barnes and Connor Bell)

with a special screening of IRA COHEN‘s

THE INVASION OF THUNDERBOLT PAGODA (1968)

Sunday, November 10th
at DREAMLAND FILM CENTER
810 E. Market Street (behind Decca Restaurant)
7 PM, $5, ALL AGES WELCOME!

Polar Satellites is the stunning collaboration by NATHAN BOWLES (Pelt/Black Twig Pickers) and SCOTT VERRASTRO (Kohoutek), released in early July, 2013 on LP and digitally by MIE. Polar Satellites is a mesmerising collection of percussion improvisations performed in duo by Nathan and Scott deep in the winter of 2009 and 2010 with absolutely no overdubs. Building on the starkness of last years Effigy by Pelt, (recently repressed on MIE), the duo have recorded an even bleaker, more minimal and hermetically vibed record together. Unnerving and hypnotic, Polar Satellites is an intense journey into the unknown, awash with uncategorisable percussive instruments, kalimbas and banjo. Nathan and Scott first met in Washington D.C when Nathan would sit in on Kohoutek sets. They were brought together as a duo on a track recorded for Three Lobed Records’ Jack Rose tribute album and were so struck by the results that they went down to Black Dirt Studios and laid down these tracks with Jason Meagher on engineering, recording and mixing duties.

mAAs is the duo of Louisville musicians Connor Bell (also of Shedding) and Tim Barnes. Louisville resident and drummer extraordinaire, the list of Tim Barnes‘s collaborators is too long to list here, but it includes Jim O’Rourke, Silver Jews, Neil Michael Hagerty and the Howling Hex, The Tower Recordings, and countless others. Most recently, Tim Barnes played drums with the resurrected lineup of The For Carnation, as well as with MV+EE at Cropped Out in November, 2011. Connor Bell has released several items over the years under the name Shedding, available at Ocio and Hometapes, all of which is meditative and still, eerie and unsettling — yet with a spectacular sense of melody.

(a scene from “The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda”)

IRA COHEN (February 3, 1935 – April 25, 2011) was an American poet, publisher, photographer and filmmaker. Cohen lived in Morocco and in New York City in the 1960s, he was in Kathmandu in the 1970s and traveled the world in the 1980s, before returning to New York, where he spent the rest of his life.

About IRA COHEN‘s 1968 film “The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda” J. Hoberman wrote the following in the Mar. 16, 2006 Village Voice: “Part ‘Dr. Strange,’ part ‘Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome,’ [‘The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda’ is] so High ’60s that you emerge from its 20-minute vision perched full-lotus on a cloud of incense, chatting with a white rabbit and smoking a banana…. ‘Invasion’ is a languidly opiated costume ball in which an assortment of masked and painted bohos, some sporting outsize elf ears, loll about a candlelit, Mylar-lined set, blowing soap bubbles and nibbling majoon. …In lieu of action, Cohen uses all manner of superimposition and prismatic image-splitting; his big effect, however, is the deliquescent Mylar reflection. What saves ‘Invasion’ from preciosity is the vague menace of Angus MacLise’s improvised pan-piping, tabla-tapping, creature-yipping score. Although this masterpiece of Tibetan-Moroccan-Druidic trance music was reissued on CD several years ago, it truly blossoms in conjunction with the exotic smorgasbord served at Cohen’s psychedelicatessen.”

The soundtrack to “THE INVASION OF THUNDERBOLT PAGODA” by Angus MacLise has been remastered by Tim Barnes for reissue on his newly-resurrected Quakebasket record label.

Find the Facebook invite here: https://www.facebook.com/events/685440198140755.

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