Bardo Pond plays ICA@50 Closing Party AUGUST 17, 2–5PM

 

 

 

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We are psyched and honored to do this. Please make it…

Bardo Pond plays ICA@50 Closing Party AUGUST 17, 2–5PM

 

ICA@50 allowed us to explore, confirm, amend, exorcise, and most importantly, celebrate the past fifty years. A highly personal experience for everyone involved—staff, artists, members, donors, and audience—the anniversary project has been an opportunity to remember and to reminisce.

We would be remiss to close the celebration without exploring the past performances of Bardo Pond. Casually known as ICA’s “house band” since the 1990s, Bardo Pond has been entwined in the story of this institution.

There have been many memorable performances. They played the opening of the 1996 exhibition You Talkin’ To Me?and recorded a 7” single for the catalogue; they performed for 2 ½ hours accompanying Andy Warhol’s film Sleep(1963) in conjunction with The Big Nothing in 2004; they accompanied artist Rodney Graham in concert at World Café Live for his 2005 ICA retrospective; and performed at the request of Trisha Donnelly for her 2008 show.

In addition to their expansive work as musicians and visual artists, members have been involved with the museum in various capacities over the years, from working as preparators to exhibiting their own work at ICA.

The closing party will feature Bardo Pond with guest DJ LIGHTHEAT. Artist Jeremiah Misfeldt will lift the curse that he cast upon ICA during The Big Nothing Cabaret in 2004. Paul Swenbeck, ICA’s Chief Preparator, launches the zine he produced in conjunction with Woe Be Gone, a mural that celebrates Margaret Kilgallen’s life and last work, which was presented as part of ICA’s 2001 exhibition East Meets West: “Folk” and Fantasy from the Coasts.

Lil’ Pop Shop popsicles, a variety of snacks, and beer will fuel the celebration, to be held (weather permitting) on ICA’s terrace.

2pm—Kick-off with music by DJ LIGHT HEAT

3pm—Jeremiah Misfeldt lifts his ten-year curse on ICA

3:05pm—Bardo Pond

4pm—DJ LIGHT HEAT

5pm—On to the next fifty!

Bardo Pond + Near Grey @ La Sala Rossa JUNE 14, 2014 8:00 PM

Bardo Pond

+ Near Grey

bardopond1-e1401211418705

Saturday, June 14, 2014
La Sala Rossa
15$/18$
20h00

Bardo Pond

The ultimate space-rockin’, shoegazin’, downbeat psyche-rock band Bardo Pond brings to Sala their long-perfected recipe of lengthy jams laden with trippy vocals and smoky guitar noodling. Veterans of over 50 releases since 1991, their explicitly drug-inspired oeuvre continues to present prime chillout vibes. They’re the hometown Philly favourites of g!ybe, opening their 2000 and 2012 concerts.

La Sala Rossa

4848 boul. St-Laurent,

Montreal, Quebec
H2T 2R6
Canada

Suoni Per Il Popolo

4871 St-Laurent

Montréal, Québec

H2T 1R6

514-284-0122 #222

 Suoni Per Il Popolo, 4-22 juin 2014

OUT NOW > SHONE LIKE A TON < REISSUE OF ANCIENT CASSETTE, THREE LOBED

 Shone Like A Ton cover art

Shone Like A Ton

by Bardo Pond

  • Record/Vinyl
    “Shone Like A Ton” is from an edition of 648 copies and is pressed on 140 gram Dutch vinyl by Record Industry. The album is housed within a full color jacket. For more information about combination packages (pairing “Shone Like A Ton” with “Refulgo” and/or other Bardo Pond or related titles), visit the Three Lobed website here –www.threelobed.com/tlr/tlr101.html

    Includes immediate download of 6-track album in the high-quality format of your choice (MP3, FLAC, and more), plus unlimited mobile access using the free Bandcamp listening app.

    shipping out on or around 25 March 2014
    edition of 600
  • Immediate download of 6-track album in the high-quality format of your choice (MP3, FLAC, and more), plus unlimited mobile access using the free Bandcamp listening app.
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about

Bardo Pond were more than happy to do it themselves in their earliest days as a band. They recorded and self-released a handful of cassette-only albums to serve as merch table offerings as well booking demos. Each of these cassettes offered a real-time snapshot of where Bardo Pond started sonically, each containing a primordial ooze of swampy, sludgey psych blues, demonstrating the essential DNA that has become Bardo Pond’s multi-decade calling card. Over the years a few of these cassettes have surfaced as band-issued CDRs and the like. However, 1992’s “Shone Like A Ton” has never been reissued apart from those old, original cassette copies. This vinyl edition of this album marks the material’s first wide release, first vinyl release, and first digital release. Three Lobed Recordings is proud to release “Shone Like A Ton” in conjunction with “Refulgo,” a collection of Bardo Pond’s earliest singles and compilations tracks (TLR-101).

credits

released 25 March 2014
John Gibbons – guitar
Michael Gibbons – guitar
Clint Takeda – bass, vocals
Bob Sentz – drums

“Shone Like a Ton” was remastered by Michael Gibbons and Patrick Klem.

OUT NOW > REFULGO < COMPILATION OF EARLIEST RARE RELEASES, THREE LOBED RECORDINGS

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Refulgo

by Bardo Pond

  • Record/Vinyl
    “Refulgo” is from an edition of 1060 copies and is pressed on two pieces of 140 gram Dutch vinyl by Record Industry. The album is housed within an old style Stoughton tip-on gatefold jacket bearing new artwork from Bardo Pond’s Clint Takeda. The album is accompanied by a download coupon for DRM-free digital files of the downloader’s choice. The material on “Refulgo” was remastered by Michael Gibbons and Patrick Klem. For more information about combination packages (pairing “Refulgo” with “Shone Like a Ton” and/or other Bardo Pond or related titles), visit the Three Lobed website here – www.threelobed.com/tlr/tlr101.htmlIncludes immediate download of 12-track album in the high-quality format of your choice (MP3, FLAC, and more), plus unlimited mobile access using the free Bandcamp listening app.
    shipping out on or around 25 March 2014
    edition of 1000

  • Immediate download of 12-track album in the high-quality format of your choice (MP3, FLAC, and more), plus unlimited mobile access using the free Bandcamp listening app.

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About –

Something happens exactly two minutes and thirty-five seconds into “Die Easy,” the A-side of Bardo Pond’s first 7”, released on the long-gone Compulsiv label back in January 1994. A slurred and shambling blues take on the old Negro spiritual, “I Want to Die Easy” — something that still might be heard around last call at any roadside joint near any American highway — just erupts. The effect is like touching the stove. The song goes white hot, in a searing overlay of guitar feedback and ferocious percussion. The blues returns, but it is never quite the same: the drums too frenzied, the squall too thick, but the hymn is unbowed: shout salvation as I fly…That was twenty years ago.Revisiting the warhorse Philadelphia band’s first cut calls to mind something that is seldom articulated: Bardo Pond make American music. Of course, one can hardly find a review or interview where they aren’t being compared to British shoegaze, German krautrock, New Zealand noise, or any one of the global host of bands with whom they have shared stages across continents: Mogwai, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Acid Mothers Temple. It is all so effortlessly cosmopolitan. But don’t believe it. Bardo Pond make American music: like Son House made American music, like Albert Ayler made American music, like Material made American music. When pressed in interviews to rattle off their international influences, the band often talks about how Sun Ra decamped for Philadelphia in 1968 — a precedent, perhaps, for walking the spaceways while planted in the city where this republic was born.Bardo Pond’s excellent 2013 Record Store Day release, Rise Above It All, made the point pretty clearly. It was comprised of covers of two masterpieces of African-American music: Funkadelic’s “Maggot Brain” and Pharaoh Sanders’s, “The Creator Has a Master Plan.” With that, a band best known for thick lysergic sludge honored its unlikely debts to funk and free jazz. Cosmic slop of a different order, perhaps.

Bardo Pond’s new release, Refulgo, comes from the other side of their storied musical history. It collects tracks from the impossible-to-find early 7”s and compilations from the years surrounding their 1995 debut Bufo Alvarius. The collection’s title, Refulgo, is appropriately retrospective, coming from the Latin word for reflecting light or shining back brilliantly—“flash back” would not be an unreasonable translation (it seems the hallucinogenic references scattered across their album titles have gotten downright scholarly). The collection documents the band in the days in which its stable lineup was just crystalizing around the brothers John and Michael Gibbons on guitars and Isobel Sollenberger on flute, violin and vocals. Bob Sentz is still playing drums on some of the early tracks, soon to be replaced by Joe Culver; and longtime bassist Clint Takeda only appears on the back half of the collection. Bardo Pond was then only just emerging from Yuengling-fueled sonic rituals in Philly row homes into a working band with steady gigs at the Khyber Pass and singles on Compulsiv and Drunken Fish. The sound they were pursuing was an uncompromising, and at times, bewitching, brand of American free music: slashing and overdriven guitars, thunderous drums, ghostly flute, infinite feedback and transported vocals that sound like mad Ophelia before she went into the river.

Bardo Pond’s early recordings are just savage; both the chops and the extraordinary control that marked the band’s later output were still, it must be said, embryonic. But the recklessness is glorious, nonetheless. For all the band’s talk of free jazz and no wave influences, the early Bardo Pond often got by on a kind of damaged blues. You can hear it on the almost-groove of “Dragonfly” and even more so on the electrocuted 12-bar of its B-side, “Blues Tune,” originally released as a 7” on Compulsiv in November 1994. The ambling “New Drunks” also (from July 1995) builds on a tortured blues lick. The transcendent “Hummingbird Mountain” is an album highlight, smearing lugubrious guitar scuzz on top on surprisingly funky drumming—the bottom dances, while the top dives: the effect is almost anthemic. The prickly, addictive “Jungle Tune” is even tighter, dispelling just enough of the murk to pass at times for positively groovy. But it is the seering, ascension of “Affa” (from the 1996 Ptolemaic Terrascope collection Succour) that best foreshadows the band’s development into purveyors of exquisite head music. This direction is confirmed by the blissful album closer, the twenty-two minute epic “Sangh Seriatim,” which encapsulated the droning, sun-drenched orientalism of the band’s masterful sophomore album, Amanita.

The title Refulgo is perhaps more than a little ironic, as Bardo Pond has often been seen in a reflected critical light. They were often taken for slack noiseniks a la Sonic Youth; or an American Jesus & Mary Chain; or epic post-rockers like Mogwai. But really they were always simply Bardo Pond, a free rock band from Philadelphia. On Refulgo, we hear the inception of an American original.
—Brent S. Sirota
January 2014

credits

released 25 March 2014
Contents originally released as follows:1. Die Easy (originally released as the “Die Easy” / “Apple Eye” 7” [CPS-014] by Compulsiv– January 1994)
2. Apple Eye (originally released as the “Die Easy” / “Apple Eye” 7” [CPS-014] by Compulsiv– January 1994)
3. Dragonfly (originally released as the “Dragonfly” / “Blues Tune” 7” [CPS-025] by Compulsiv– November 1994)
4. Blues Tune (originally released as the “Dragonfly” / “Blues Tune” 7” [CPS-025] by Compulsiv– November 1994)
5. Trip Fuck (originally released as the “Trip Fuck” / “Hummingbird Mountain” 7” [DPR-009] by Drunken Fish– March 1994)
6. Hummingbird Mountain (originally released as the “Trip Fuck” / “Hummingbird Mountain” 7” [DPR-009] by Drunken Fish– March 1994)
7. New Drunks (originally released on the Bardo Pond / Bear split 7” [CHE-034] by Che – July 1995)
8. Affa (originally released on the “Succour” compilation CD [POT CD 01 / FLY020] by Ptolemaic Terrascope / Flydaddy – September 1996)
9. Tests For New Swords (originally released as the “Tests for New Swords” / “Good Friday” 7” [SB62] by Siltbreeze – September 1996)
10. Good Friday (originally released as the “Tests for New Swords” / “Good Friday” 7” [SB62] by Siltbreeze – September 1996)
11. Jungle Tune (originally released on the “Following The Bouncing Ball” compilation [BING003] by Ba Da Bing! – August 1995)
12. Sangh Seriatim (originally released on the “Harmony of the Spheres” compilation [DFR25] by Drunken Fish – November 1996)All material remastered in 2013 by Michael Gibbons and Patrick Klem.

RSD LP Release out 4/20 on Fire

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Bardo Pond – “Rise Above It All” EP Released: 21 Mar 2013

This is an exclusive Record Store Day 2013 release and will be available to purchase from us after 20th April 2013 (If stocks allow).

Bardo Pond return with a special release for Record Store Day in the form of a limited edition 12″ featuring their explosive interpretations of Funkadelic’s “Maggot Brain” and Pharoah Sanders’ “The Creator Has a Master Plan”. With “Maggot Brain” running to over 21 minutes and “Creator…” at fifteen minutes, these are epic performance pieces, taking the listener through a range of emotions as the band explore their innermost creativity.

As Michael Gibbons from Bardo Pond explains:

“These tracks represent the apex of sublimity for us. They are archetypes for our way of making music. They both offer the listener a mainline to an emotional epiphany that can only be experienced through listening to these very songs. Through seemingly minimal means, gut wrenching tones and glorious repetition, a gateway opens, endorphins are released, illumination is attained. We stand in the light emanating from these Pyramids of Sound. We humbly rolled them up in the Lemur House as a form of pilgrimage. Please partake. Thanks.