Bowerbird is pleased to present Attorneys General featuring Bill Nace and Ken Brenninger with an opening set by Andy Giles.

Co-presented with Open Mouth Records

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Attorneys General is a project led by Matthew Byars of DC-based band The Caribbean and NPR-distributed podcast Essential Tremors.  A formative experience for Byars as a listener was hearing the work of sound engineer Martin Swope of Mission of Burma on their seminal 1985 live record, The Horrible Truth About Burma, in which Swope, using a reel-to-reel tape machine, captured, looped, manipulated, and destroyed elements of the band’s sound in spontaneous and unexpected ways.  Byars has adapted this approach to having three-four people (different players every time, mostly) generate utterly improvised sound through a mixing board he controls, which allows him to capture, loop, manipulate, and destroy the sounds they create. Results vary from the transcendent to the disastrous, but the inherent risk involved is, ultimately, the point.

Bill Nace is an artist and musician based in Philadelphia, PA. He has collaborated with an extraordinary range of musicians, including Michael Morley, Graham Lambkin, Matt Krefting, Twig Harper, Jooklo Duo, chik white, John Truscinski, Thurston Moore, Jake Meginsky, Jessica Rylan, Paul Flaherty, Wally Shoup, Aaron Dilloway, and Kim Gordon, with whom he regularly plays as one half of the duo Body/Head. In 2020 Nace released the critically acclaimed solo record “BOTH” on Drag City. A collaboration with Gordon and Dilloway — “Body/Dilloway/Head” — is out now on Three Lobed Records and his newest solo LP Through a Room was released in November on Drag City. He has been a featured musician in festivals such as ATP (curated by Jim Jarmusch and held in Monticello, NY), Colour Out of Space(Brighton, UK), Supersonic Festival (Birmingham, UK), International Festival Musique Actuelle (Victoriaville, QC), and Homegrown (Boston, MA). He has performed in a wide variety of venues, running the gamut from the Musee d’Art Contemporain (Strasbourg, France) to The Stone (NYC) to Bennington College (Vermont). Nace’s range has been described as “veering from sculptural, almost Remko-Scha-esque chime to Loren Connors-style elegance in only a few short moves.” (Mimaroglu Music, 2010). In addition to Drag City and Three Lobed, recordings can be found on Ecstatic Peace (Northampton, MA), Ultra Eczema (Belgium), Holidays (Italy), Throne Heap (VA), HP Cycle (Toronto, ON), as well as on Nace’s own label Open Mouth.

Born in North Carolina, 1968 Andy Giles’s first electric guitar was acquired at age 15. While friends were learning chords and theory, he was busy experimenting with various pieces of metal to alter the sound of the strings and pickups. A coworker compared what he was doing to Fred Frith’s 1974 album ‘Guitar Solos’ and that discovery eventually led to the even earlier work of AMM. Those recordings featuring Keith Rowe were essential to his development and then actually meeting him and Jim O’Rourke in 1994 gave the confidence to start performing. However it was Kevin Drumm’s 1997 self-titled CD on Perdition Plastics that exceeded what Andy thought was possible from a guitar and had him questioning whether anyone could equal it. This drove him to tear apart everything and reinvent how he approached the instrument.