Pop Mythology

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Gustave Doré

February 17, 2012 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

From RichDoors

February 16, 2012 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

ShotBigHorixon

February 10, 2012 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

Mike Kelley

February 2, 2012 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

February 1, 2012 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

Who Owns Our Modern Mythologies?

January 31, 2012 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

Notes for Games

sculptural movement during live shows

movement through jack hanley gallery

January 29, 2012 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

Games Footage

Filmed by Ricky McAndress

January 25, 2012 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

Peekaboo in Los Angeles

January 24, 2012 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

Mercury Devouring His Children

photos by Sarah Sproviero

January 21, 2012 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

Saturn Devouring His Children

by Francisco Goya

January 20, 2012 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

ION interview

Read it here

(above image from the Clift Hotel event)

January 19, 2012 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

CocoonHouse on 1-12-2012

video by Ricky McAndress

Read a review of the show here at Audio Femme

January 18, 2012 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

Interview with Bullett

January 17, 2012 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

KEXP at NewVillager’s Mercury Lounge Show

Read the review

January 16, 2012 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

Last night at Mercury Lounge

January 13, 2012 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

Images from Temporary Culture

Photos of NewVillager’s Temporary Culture installation at Human Resources by Faith Ann Young

January 12, 2012 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

Mercury Lounge show this Thursday 1/12

with Avan Lava

at 9:30pm

Get info and tickets here

January 9, 2012 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

More scenes from Games

images from NewVillager’s installation and performance at Jack Hanley gallery in NYC

January 3, 2012 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

Two Sumerian Kings

December 29, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

Scenes from The Game Cycles at Jack Hanley gallery

photos by Ricky McAndress

December 24, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

At Santos

NewVillager sticker slapped on Nate Lowman’s wall at Santo’s party house

December 22, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

OverPass

drawing by Brian Mendez

December 12, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

All Saints Rooftop Session

December 7, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

The Game Cycles at Jack Hanley Gallery on Dec 16th

one night concert performance inside a gallery installation

with dancers, living sculpture, tower, mover, and game

7pm-10pm

free admission (no tickets required)

byob

December 1, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

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"The 10 songs on NewVillager are an unpretentious celebration of the last 30 years of pop and R&B." - Matthew Fritch, emusic

-"NewVillager reminds me of Scooby & the Gang, except they make mysteries, not solve them." - Phat Man Dee

"NewVillager's use of two singers and vocal effects on both voices turns the vocals into more of an instrument than a method of lyrical communication." - Adam Valeiras, Filter Magazine

"I first saw NewVillager play in a field outside of Toronto, with about six other friends. We thought there was going to be a festival called NewVillager but NewVillager turned out to be a band. About six hundred people had come from various parts of Ontario, Canada. The field was slightly muddy and they didn't begin the show till shortly after midnight. In those few hours before the band began to play, there was a lot of throwing of bottles -- the atmosphere was very violent, and I was deeply scared. People were shouting at the stage (NewVillager was supposed to play at 10:00 pm) and I saw one fight involving about sixteen men. I was pretty frazzled when NewVillager took the stage, and had been begging my friends for an hour to go, but once the music began, peace instantly came over the park. A great silence (apart from the music on stage) wrapped around each one of us. It was a moment quite unlike any I've ever experienced -- truly a transformation. The humans, who had been aggressive and unruly before, had been put into a gentle trance like obedient dogs. NewVillager played for about six hours, and by the end, half of the park was asleep, a few people were making love, and the rest of us (me included) were dancing a new dance, one invented there on the spot, which my friends and I sometimes return to in everyday life, which we have dubbed the New Trance Dance. It has to come entirely from a peaceful, still and calm interior. Then the limbs reflect that stillness. Whenever I do it, or see a friend do it, we're brought back to that NewVillager concert, and the awesome feeling of tranquility we experienced in that crowd." - Sheila Heti, DanceWorks magazine

"NewVillager combines angular Dirty Projectors prog-rock with old fashioned funk soul melodies" - New York Magazine

"NewVillager are an extraordinarily confident pair, hailing from Brooklyn and Northern California, per their MySpace. The same Rupert Murdoch-owned page lists a series of what I can only hope for my job's sake are fictitious press clippings, likening the band's music to mystical experiences outside aviation musuems in Norway, the hallowed sport of Goalball, and 'a falafel sandwich as tall as a mangrove, filled with curried, salted plant stamens'" - Pitchfork

"If you trapped a lightning bolt and tantric sex in an empty whiskey bottle, then smashed that bottle on a discothèque dance floor, the resulting explosion would sound exactly like the debut album from NewVillager. Formed in 2008 at the base of Cuexcomate, the world's smallest volcano (Google it), NewVillager answers the musical question: what would it sound like if Mad Max and Mozart started a band? But then again, NewVillager is not a band, it's an experience, like the time you drank 16 Red Bulls and free climbed to the peak of the Matterhorn at Euro Disney. So drop the needle on NewVillager's LP and cancel your subscription to Hustler.com, because economists say that when the album comes out, Internet porn will go out of business." -Alex Scordelis, Dan Quayle Elementary School Alumni Newsletter, August 2011

"Conceptual art inclinations aside, this is simply great pop music." - Matt Collar, All Music

"The harmonies are absolute: extremely rare is the instance where Ben Bromley or Ross Simonini sings alone, prowling in tandem like tank treads grinding up soil. As opposed to Krautrock and dub, New Villager’s swirling psychedelia (occasionally a baroque suite, like “Lighthouse”) dumps depth-charge bass notes over the deck, never jarringly but enough to buffet the songs and nudge them forward." - Steve Forstneger, Illinois Entertainer

"It’s amazing what machines can do. You may remember Rafael Johnson as the robotics mastermind behind BalanceBot, a gynoid automaton whose resemblance to gymnast Yekaterina Lobaznyuk in both physical appearance and performance style led to major controversy at the 2000 Sydney Olympics. After several quiet years, presumably spent dealing with the legal fallout from that incident, Johnson reënters the spotlight with a new project that is sure to impress. NewVillager, a “band” consisting of amazingly lifelike robots called ROSS and BEN, is Johnson’s answer to the oft-asked question, “Can robots make art?” Programmed with the discographies of over three hundred artists including Mary J. Blige, Moby, Gorillaz, and The Spin Doctors, Johnson’s NewVillager uses a unique program called Algorhythm to cull the information in its database and produce perfect (“Literally perfect,” Johnson insists) pop songs. What’s more, Johnson says he spent two years alone perfecting ROSS and BEN’s haircuts. “These are the most handsome robots I’ve ever made,” Johnson announced with pride at a press conference Thursday. “Despite her exquisite Russian cheekbones, BalanceBot doesn’t even come close.” -Meagan Day, Riker’s Island Review, July 2011

"There is no you in NewVillager, but there is a we. Your job thenceforth will be that of the bodhisattva, the guru, the gap-toothed docent with a serious thing for Whistler's Mother. There will be others, newervillagers than yourself, who never stood a chance either. Only through them do you stand any hope of tracing your footsteps back to where you began." - Daniel Levin Becker, L.H.O.O.Quarterly

"A surreal yet effortlessly appealing sound" - Boomkat

"NewVillager are only the most prominent members in a slew of new bands in the loosely affiliated "Diet Shaman" movement. A self-described "rag-tag crew," Spielberg won't touch them. NewVillager's music creates a hot, moist aura that actually reduces the appetite and tends to increase physical activity. Sexual intercourse and modern dance become indistinguishable. Do you like passionate, wet-sounding coitus? How about special suits that blind and deafen the babies wearing them, so the babies are protected from the loud love-acts the suits engage in? Would you like a falafel sandwich as tall as a mangrove, filled with curried, salted plant stamens? The sandwich shakes with frequencies that bake in the mozzarella, turning the cheese a deep golden brown." - Andrew Leland, Chief Film Critic, The Uncle-Valley Herald, October 6th, 2008

"Pop shamans taking meticulous steps towards a mysterious, musical nirvana" -NME, from "NewVillager - Through The Doors Of Perception"

"Buried deep in the American memory hole is this thing called NewVillager that threatens to—if not watched, and studied, and cornered—collapse all that is around it in on itself. NewVillager is, as you no doubt know, a part of a tradition that begins with Villager. Continued to Villager 2. And VillagerVillager. And VillagersAgain. And now to NewVillager. The Villager tradition ingests itself periodically, in its way following the model created by the Puerto Rican pop group Menudo. In fact, the only major difference between the process by which Menudo evolves and the way a Villager iteration forms is the Villager commitment to what they refer to as Radical Parthenogenesis." — Matthew Simmons, The Daily Press, Escanaba Michigan, April 15, 1985, excerpted from the article, NewVillager Shakes Its Finger At Pop's Lucid Dream

"A thrilling new world of performance, art, and performance art." - SF Weekly

"NewVillager (should be said as one word, like "Terwilliger") is the musical project of Ben Bromley and Ross Simonini, two multi-instrumentalists who remain friends. Goalball is a game designed for the blind, kind of like handball. A lot of good bands came out of the goalball scene back in '83, '85— the Sweetie Motions, the Sans Larrys—and NewVillager listened to all of them, mostly in Ross's car, a Karmann Ghia he bought from Ben's mom, against the wishes of Ben's dad. They formed the band to carry that torch forward, and started out playing low-level Goalball tournaments, rigged games in bad neighborhoods, but Goalball is supposed to be played in total silence, because the ball has bells on it. They should have known; it was a tough time for the two of them, tougher than most. The thing is, they listened, they soaked it up, the sound of that ball and its bells, and then they went into the woods and wrote a record. Everything matters, is the point, even when you're in the woods and your name implies isolated tribesmen. It's like George Steiner says: 'Explorers' postulates about totally isolated tribes, about corners of tropical forest or mountain innocent of any contact with the outside are largely spurious. Good shivery stuff for the glossy magazines. How word sped across the barbed lines of mutually incomprehensible tongues, how iron utensils from the distant fringe stations came to be found in the inmost of the Mato Grosso, was something of a riddle. But the facts were certain. News could tear like invisible fire through thicket and across cataracts. You had only to listen and it came humming back.'" -Jordan Bass, Philadelphia Herald-Times, Sept 25th 2008

"Listen to "Rich Doors" and feel the weight of a snowy world lift from your shoulders. Watch as your feet start to tap and your hips sway gently from side to side. Feel the love as a smile glides across your face. Wonder is this what they're spinning on daytime radio on Venus. Think about what tomorrow might sound like." - Jim Carroll, Irish Times

"Should immediately be forgotten less it spawns more of this modern music." - Terrence Adams, Agit Reader

"The twin men of the earliest incarnation of the musical contritionists now know as New Villager (brothers, born in a wood room with blacklight) had been in strict negotiations with Pier Pasolini on the eve of his death (the 3 men shared candlelit breadloaves and St. Pauli Girls on the tab of the richest man in Vienna) in regards to the creation for a meta-verbal and aurally backmassaging soundtrack for the auteur's would-have-been next masterpiece, a 4D video experiment including recently destroyed footage of Klaus Kinski's breech birth and a Braille monologue by the grandson of Brian Eno. At Pasolini's passing, said soundtrack was said to have been buried in the moss marshes in a restricted region of Port St. John, Florida, guarded by two men who had previously been employed as doormen at the Lordmendum Pyramids in Bazul. In light of good fortune, and a multi-digit grant from the estate of a second generation relative of Mark Rothko, the New Villager soundtracks have most recently been extricated, retouched, and fed through light detectors for maxmial conductivity and gleam pleasure. Prolonged exposure to said soundtracks, methodically being leaked to you and yours via methods in which we can not hereof speak, is said to have, in lab chickens, and in children made of sun, stretch the earlobes into elevator cables, which, when strung up in the correct building, will lead the listener to a room where his new forehead, glands, and jeweled wristwatch waits." - Blake Butler, Liquid Parisian

"Brooklyn-based ensemble New Villager make blue-eyed soul and psych-inflected dance-rock, often presented with a strong visual performance art aesthetic. Centered around the talents of visual artists/musicians Ross Simonini and Ben Bromley, New Villager first began while Simonini and Bromley were attending college in San Francisco. While the music itself is essentially straightforward pop/soul with a heavy dance-pop vibe, the band often performs with similarly minded drummer/artist Colin Palmer in extended, "installation"-style performances that feature such elements as dance, visual art, writing, film, and more. New Villager released their full-length self-titled debut album on Iamsound in 2011. ~ Matt Collar, Rovi

"NewVillager is Kate Bush for nerdy guys." - Ion Magainze

"Je n'ai jamais fait l'amour doux que l'exubérant avec des sons de NewVillager qui coule à travers le haut-fi." - Scheherezade Blum, editor, New Seine Review, Sept 27th 2008

"Rock music has always lent itself to the creation of mythology. Whether it’s an apocryphal story of a sand shark or the carefully created origins of KISS’ make-up, musicians have sought to both become and construct characters audiences will find compelling. The Beatles transferred their narrative from music to film, and the Monkees were created wholesale and then rebelled in Head. Bands like Coheed and Cambria and even Insane Clown Posse have taken up the mantle in recent years, translating their stage personas into comics, elaborate videos, and features. New York band New Villager is putting a new spin on this tradition, basing all of its various projects on the mono-myth of Joseph Campbell and the writings of Mircea Eliade. As New Villager creates its own myth with a dazzling series of live shows, videos, and art installations, Ross Simonini and Ben Bromley are also thinking deeply about what it means to tell these stories, both to the artist and the audience. In the midst of New Villager’s fall tour, Simonini took some time to discuss the ideas that underpin the band, and how it functions as a multimedia project." - Mike Burr, Prefix

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