artist Archivist

As the summer of 2007 turned cold ben McCarthy (lapsed writer; failed poet; M.A. drop-out) and his band, which had never once performed publicly together, parted ways. As the winter set in, McCarthy lost interest in his studies, grew impatient with the eternal wrangling of the word, and foreshortened his already narrow social circle. As the frost seized hold of the city’s soil, so he hunkered into the strange masonry of his basement apartment. The long months passed over him as the turmoil of winter traverses the burrow of the torpid beast, who sleeps but does not dream. But into the hollow in him where once there was a taste for disorder, for deconstruction, for decreation, a new light stirred, a new language burst forth from him. Soon he began to write in this newfound tongue, in this new sonic geometry; running the gamut from crude ejaculations, to half-mad ecstasies, to simple sorrow. He wrote these utterances in digital signals, in the refraction of one moment, one sound, one aural record of an event, by another, layered upon another and another. When the spring uprooted the freeze and flung it from her breast, he emerged onto the bustle of Parc Avenue pale, under slept, with the stink of nervous sweat and stale liquor clinging to his clothes— but with the calm ember of a hundred-years of calm burning cold in his grey eye. He clutched to his breast a sordid and melancholy autobiography, an archive of what he’d seen, what he’d found, what he’d never find. He went forth, followed by those who had kept him through the long months, and he began to sing. He shows his songs to all who will listen now. He shares his virtueless lessons with a cold persistence that belies the broad shadow of all of time— to which his looming frame commits its own umber. Archivist combines wide and diverging influences with instinct-wrought musical carnality to hold out to his listener, in one dirty fist, the ragged ends of dailiness. He is supported, in providence, by a varying chorus of cussing saints, in the form of Sarah McCarthy, Lisa J. Smith (the Dears; Pony Up), Sarah Moundroukas (Pony Up) and Kasia Juno, (without whom, he would, without a doubt, even now find his carcass being dragged to the sea by the unemployed Saint Lawrence).

ben mccarthy singer; song writer; guitar; synth
Lisa J. Smith defrayer; singer; bass; keyboard
Brendan Cordy violin; bass; guitar; vocals
Katye Seip vocals; q-chord; synth; percussion