artist July Fourth Toilet

Go KRAZY! All Night At The Vancouver Art Gallery
Friday June 27^th, 9:00 pm to 5:00 am
http://www.vanartgallery.bc.ca/events_and_programs/fuse.html

July Fourth Toilet, an eclectic band of accomplished multidisciplinary artists known for their infamous live shows blending wildly experimental interpretations of popular music forms with high-concept theatricality, will be presenting a 3-room, 8-hour show of music, multimedia, dance and performance art, hosted by the VAG Fuse series as part of the KRAZY! The Delirious World of Anime + Comics + Video Games + Art exhibit.

Courtroom One will feature two performances of Dionysian sludge machismo-drippage skronk from the newly-released limited edition vinyl album July Fourth Toilet presents Balls Boogie featuring Me and Bobby McGee plus!: Kentucky Whore and Many Others. Rock turns in on itself and eats its own emasculated tail at 10:00pm and midnight.

Courtroom Two will feature ongoing improvisational sound art to illustrate themes of transformation, movement, inner voyages of discovery, outer journeys through the universe, birth and rebirth, and rites of passage best avoided starting at 9 PM and ending at 5 AM!!!!!!. The performance will be accompanied by multiple projections and live scratch animation on 16mm film.

The Rotunda will feature a performance of the piece "Enter the Princess" created specifically for the natural acoustics and shape of the Rotunda using placed choral voices and Chinese gongs in a spectacle of ceremony and visceral sound vibrations accompanied by minimalist dance based on ancient Indian yogic poses. The singers will encircle dancers who face inward to the center of the circle as they move to the pulse of the live score: movement as sound, sound as movement.

Fuse will also present music, art and multimedia by Arowbe, Vancouver Community Gamelan, Felix Culpa Theatre and the NEOGRAF collective, plus a 12-hour live drawing jam by Vancouver comic artists.

CASE Productions presents
"July Fourth Toilet Presents: Balls Boogie Featuring Me And Bobby McGee Plus!: Kentucky Whore And many Others!" Record Launch Party
with guests Basketball, The Lovin' Hands (from Calgary) and Stamina Mantis
Friday July 4^th at Pub 340, 340 Cambie Street
Doors 9:00 pm

July Fourth Toilet gets back to its roots on the July fourth!: down 'n' dirty on skid row!: in celebration of the release of July Fourth Toilet presents Balls Boogie featuring Me and Bobby McGee plus!: Kentucky Whore and Many Others, their new gritty biker boogie-tinged slab o' overcooked vinyl. Cum get blasted by a rocket ship of sonic slime, exploratory psych-O-droolic instros and zonked ballads in an intimate environment of revelatory boozy revelry!

http://www.julyfourthtoilet.com
http://www.myspace.com/julyfourthtoilet

July Fourth Toilet

presents

Balls Boogie featuring Me and Bobby McGee

Artist: JULY FOURTH TOILET

Title: JULY FOURTH TOILET PRESENTS BALLS BOOGIE FEATURING: ME AND BOBBY McGEE PLUS!: KENTUCKY WHORE AND MANY OTHERS!
Format: LP
Release Date: July 4th, 2008
Catalogue : PA871

Limited edition of 500 vinyl LPs
with special art booklet and MP3 download code

.What is the album? One third hard driving biker boogie, one third faux Eastern but 10,000 miles up experimental instros, one third wonky ballads, one percent je ne sais quoi, and zero bullshit.

July Fourth Toilet may just be the most lucid yet visceral musical act in existence!

Legendary long-time West Coast Canadian musical act July Fourth Toilet has been doing it their way since 1994.

July Fourth Toilet have made it their mandate to never perform the same show twice. Show themes for this multi-piece, multi-instrumental co-ed bargain basement technicolor variety revue have included thirty second songs and medleys, as well as tributes to tea, candy, Davy Jones and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Their Satanic Majesties Request, September 11^th, and legendary songwriter Paul Williams (with Paul Williams himself enjoying the show from ten feet away).

July Fourth Toilet ritualistically combines and transcends pop song craft, versatile musicianship, performance, non-musicians, and pure improvisation to create their unique and inimitable sound and persona.

Named by Gregg Turkington and John Singer of the anarchic and confrontationally comedic experimental two piece Zip Code Rapists.

Their first album, self-released, was intended to make people feel warm inside with its sense of soft experimental psych-pop. Entitled Something For Everyone it received critical raves and was treasured by those who got a chance to hear it.

Tell us more about this new album! For their follow-up album July Fourth Toilet set up a series of obstructions to overcome in order to create greatest listenable unlistenable album of all time using an old semi-generic budget label record as a loose template. Some of the best art and entertainment is created from barriers.

What about the music? July Fourth Toilet begins their obstacle course of an album with an eerie rendition of the most common song they could think of: Kris Kristofferson's "Me And Bobby McGee." What follows are original numbers beginning with five hard driving boogie rock tracks with G Funk keyboards. To maximize listening pleasure and recording efficiency, the band used the same backing track of one of those songs and added new lyrics and vocals et al to create an entirely new song ("Thanks Drugs"). This is followed by four or five experimental non-rock based tracks created by different teamings of J4T members. It all ends in a lush ballad of hope and renewal, a gentle, shaky exhale from such relentless themes of unbridled machismo.

The album is wrapped up in the unwieldy title July Fourth Toilet presents Balls Boogie Featuring Me And Bobby McGee, Plus!: Kentucky Whore And Many Others. So many factors were important, July Fourth Toilet wanted every song to be well crafted and to have the album flow in a new (utilizing restructured fragments of old) and unexpected manner on rather different pinpoints of the musical map, to have it all be cohesive to the unsuspecting, a story of overcoming difficulties for the listeners' enjoyment.

Website Launch Party

A Journey Into The Musical Past Using Technology Of The Future! 
with guests Shearing Pinx and Ice Cream
Saturday March 8^th, The Astoria, 769 East Hastings

 
Question: which local musical act

• turned a generic 1970s K-Tel children's album into a live rock opera performed in animal costumes
• got heckled by legendary rock critic Richard Meltzer while performing in a junkyard
• did a tribute show to songwriter Paul Williams, who climbed onstage and told them they "kicked ass" for doing a song from the movie Ishtar
• are part of the influential West Coast psychedooolia art scene
• staged more than 80 completely unique shows over their 14-year history?

July Fourth Toilet has been following a philosophy of making every performance conceptually different since 1994.  This merry band of musical experimentalists has merged performance art with playful genre-bending in their relentless exploration and deconstruction of pop culture arcana and contemporary music.

jody franklin, a writer and multidisciplinary artist who has been with July Fourth Toilet since 1994, started documenting the history of the troupe on their website last year.  The Performance History section of JulyFourthToilet.com can be read start to finish as the troupe's collective autobiography. It tells the story of the eclectic group show by show, as members share anecdotes about their experiences creating musical performance art together. "In my opinion, we have a body of work that is totally different from what anybody else has done, and I really wanted the world to know about it," said franklin, who designed and edited the site. "I crafted it like a documentary film, editing quotes and visual art together to tell our story in a highly readable, entertaining and artful way."  It is firmly rooted within the cultural context of the Vancouver music and art scenes, as Toilet members openly discuss their contemporaries, scene politics, and how they were perceived by fans and critics.  "It may be the most comprehensive window into the Vancouver music scene of this era."     

"We've recorded so much material that was never released, and I wanted to start getting some of our older music out before our new album comes out this summer," said Robert Dayton (of Canned Hamm fame), who co-founded July Fourth Toilet with Julian Lawrence (publisher of Drippytown Comics & Stories).  Last year, franklin released their long-lost EP Childhood Will End in MungBeing, the online art magazine he publishes. Dayton has followed this up by digging into their audio archives: the White (Trash) Album, a skewed take on the Beatles put out as a cassette on noise label Trackshun in 1994, will be re-released in its original format.  And a CDR of a sloppy feel-good live performance at a Canada Day front porch barbeque in 1995 will also be available to fans for the first time ever.  

July Fourth Toilet celebrates their history, the official launch of JulyFourthToilet.com version 3.0, and the release of the White (Trash) Album (cassette) and July Fourth Toilet plays Canada Day on John Knowles' Front Porch Live 1995! (CDR) at the Astoria on Saturday, March 8^th. They will be doing a tribute to their website and performing songs drawn from their Performance History.