Feb
21
with 75 Dollar Bill
Fri February 21st, 2020
7:15PM
Main Space
Minimum Age: 16+
Doors Open: 6:30PM
Show Time: 7:15PM
Event Ticket: $20
Day of Show: $25
Bush Tetras
The Bush Tetras were prescient outliers on the New York underground music scene of the late ’70s and early ’80s. While their music was taut and aggressive like punk, Pat Place’s guitar added an inspired dissonance that reflected her connections to the city’s no wave scene (she worked with two of James Chance’s better-known projects, the Contortions and James White & the Blacks). Their crucial early ’80s recordings (collected on 1995’s Boom in the Night) also showed the influence of dub in their rubbery basslines and sense of space, and the group’s chaotic but muscular attack anticipated the mid-’80s noise rock movement as well as post-punk. 2021’s Rhythm and Paranoia: The Best of Bush Tetras was a career-spanning anthology that’s the best introduction to their music, and after the death of longtime drummer Dee Pop, Sonic Youth’s Steve Shelley joined the band and produced 2023’s They Live in My Head.
75 Dollar Bill
Che Chen: electric guitar, quartertone electric guitar, alto saxophone
Rick Brown: percussion, alto saxophone
75 Dollar Bill formed in New York City in 2012; the singular music of this instrumental duo draws various sources from around the world and across disciplines, everything from Mauritanian guitar to raw minimalism and blown-out urban blues, yet sounds unlike anything we’ve heard before. Wooden Bag is their debut vinyl release (after various cassette and digital EPs) and first for Other Music Recording Co., packaged in a limited-edition hand-stamped sleeve, download included. The band will be touring the US throughout the winter and spring.
Che Chen has recorded and toured playing violin, guitars and other instruments, with a diverse set of artists including True Primes, Jozef van Wissem, Maher Shalal Hash Baz, Che-Shizu and Robbie Lee. His guitar work explores a variety of influences, including Mauritanian guitar, Indian music, North Mississippi guitar boogie, Sun Ra, Led Zeppelin, the Velvets, Henry Flynt, and DNA.
Rick Brown has been playing drums and percussion on the downtown New York scene since the early ‘80s, and has recorded and toured with numerous bands, including V-Effect, Run On, Timber, Fish & Roses, and Chris Stamey, and has collaborated live or in the studio with Tortoise, Matmos, Yo La Tengo, Charles Hayward, Fred Frith, Malcolm Mooney, Elliott Sharp, Jean Smith, Mark Cunningham and many others.
In The New York Times, Ben Ratliff wrote of the duo’s live show: “Che Chen’s guitar: a cut-rate Japanese model sketching looped figures inside old Arabic modes, pushing jagged sound through a small amplifier. But as Mr. Chen stood playing hypnotic guitar repetitions, moving with the stresses of the riffs, the drummer Rick Brown sat on a square wooden box, open in the back, and attacked it from above. Sometimes he used his heel to bounce on a kick-drum pedal, pointing backward toward the box; mostly he was striking the sides of the box with his hands and a homemade mallet, hard, finding different pitches in different places. He cued transitions in the music, building odd or compound rhythms, turning them around and blurring distinctions between downbeats and upbeats. On the surface, the rhythms were only secondary to the guitar lines; deeper down, they were enfolded. One couldn’t do without the other.”
75 Dollar Bill on Bandcamp
75 Dollar Bill on Other Music Recording Co.