The Bowery Presents

The Mercury Lounge upcoming shows

The Craic Festival featuring...

Mark Geary
11:00
Duke Special
10:00

Dirty Epics
9:00
And So I Watch You From Afar
8:00

Due to a medical emergency Paddy Casey has canceled his performance. He will be replaced by Dirty Epics and a late night jam session featuring all the artists on tonight's bill. All tickets will be accepted and refunds are available at point of purchase.
Venue:
The Mercury Lounge
Date:
Sat 3/13
Notes:
21+
Doors: 8:00 PM / Show: 8:00 PM
$12 adv / $15 dos
Tickets
And So I Watch You From Afar
myspace
Other bands talk about it, And So I Watch You From Afar do it. In 2009, ASIWYFA played a mammoth 170 gigs all over Europe. From extensive tours in the UK to opening Pukkelpop festival in Belgium in front of 4500 captivated people to Novarock festival in Austria, gigs in Germany, Czech Republic, Poland, Ukraine and Russia, this is band that mean business.

Their hometown Belfast shows are legendary from the 1,000 capacity headline Christmas homecoming gig in the Ulster Hall right down to a small secret basement party which was shut down by the police late in the night for being too insane.

Everything about ASIWYFA is gargantuan. Their critically-acclaimed, self-titled debut album released in 2009 is exhibit A. From the the iron-clad riffs to the pummelling crash of the cymbals to the palpable positivity of the music, it's everything great rock (never mind just instrumental rock) music should be. Even the song which take in titles like 'Set Guitars To Kill', 'Clench Fists, Grit Teeth... GO!' and the ASIWYFA practice what you preach mantra 'Don't Waste Time Doing Things You Hate', are epic in scale.

Filled with monstrous guitars, bulging rock histrionics and genuinely breathtaking moments, And So I Watch You from Afar is easily one of the best records of 2009.

Revered music publications like The Quietus ('Quite some distance ahead of the rest of '09's guitar albums so far'), NME ('The sound of someone crashing an oil tanker through Sigur Ros' ice floe'), Kerrang! (' It's rare for a body of work to be so dreamy and elegiac yet conversely monstrously heavy') and Vice ('rescuing the instrumetal ship from the deepest depths of irrevocable mediocrity') all agree.

ASIWYFA are a band that are only going to get bigger and more inspiring. Expect a new EP - The Letters in January 2010 and a second album in the first half of the year. Meanwhile, catch the band's incendiary live show at a venue near you.
Mark Geary
official website
myspace
New York -1993

From what I remember….
I had started playing shows - supports, late night gigs, the parks, the subways and even at open mic's. One in particular stands out, in the sidewalk cafe on Avenue A, whose M.C. Latch became a friend and a confidante. My brother Karl was running the Sin-é cafe with Shane Doyle on St. Mark's Place, this helped while I was coming to terms with the enormity of my move from Dublin to New York. Where to live, how one made money, where could I play shows, and all the other questions that needed answering?

You could still play in CBGB's - if you could guarantee you could bring a crowd, or as happens most, you didn't mind playing at 3am on a Monday to no one and with no money to show for it. "The walls, the waitress and the weirdo's" as "Latch" would say.

Giuliani was the mayor of New York, having made a name for himself as a district attorney, prosecuting the likes of John Gotti from the Gambino crime family, who was very much the Godfather of the times.

A pizza slice cost a dollar, which increasingly became the only source of food and nutrition for the hard nights when no money was made. This was also how you could bribe your band mates into playing, you'd buy the pizza on the way home.

There were coffee shops, like Sin-é - that acted more like mini orphanages for the transplanted and the disposed, people writing plays, people nodding out, people hiding from the heat or the cold, from the landlord or the law.

New York somehow offered me a chance to reinvent myself, it offered me shelter if I was willing to work late and hustle, friendship to people on a first name basis but without knowing their details but what I wanted more than anything was to play music, to get these songs out of my head, to record and see where it took me but each door seemed bolted shut; I was at a loss as to how people went about finding a way in.

New York 2009

I sit in a cafe off of 2nd avenue. I always seem to find myself in coffee shops in New York, I know more people through the hours and years I have hung out in them, years can go by and I will walk into one and see someone I know. It’s a feeling that I have just stepped outside for a little and here I am again, seeing the people who had formed my first impressions of New York, all these years later.

We are recording three shows over a week long period; I sit here with a half read book and half written set list, nervous about tonight.

Each show turned out so differently, each live show is so utterly different. The crowd change. The feeling in the room changes, the sound of your foot as you stamp along to the songs, sound different, my voice through the monitor in each club - different,
How does this all work!?

How do you record a show that captures the essences of what it is you do as a musician? The truth is that it's a rare thing; the hope is that you trust yourself enough that you have the tape running while you are on, that it translates unto a CD, that this was a moment. Not just a version of a song, but a feeling and communion between you and your audience. The cynic's will tell you -"it's all been done before" - live performance is a vehicle for your CD sales and you move from town to town hawking your music and climbing the rung of the slippiest ladder you've ever known but tonight at least, I have come here, with a clear idea of what and where I came from, and why I do what I do, New York for all it's madness, for all the pitfalls and crushing defeats, also has a tale to tell and a lesson to teach if you sit and listen long enough and if you remain teachable.
That’s what I've learned

Love Mark Oct 2009
Duke Special
official website
myspace
Duke Special’s immense creative talents have seen him creating a night of song and theatre in the Spiegeltent for the Dublin Fringe Festival, performing his songs accompanied by a 60 piece strong RTE Symphony Orchestra at a sold out show in Dublin’s National Concert Hall, and writing the theme tune for Sesame Tree - the Northern Ireland edition of Sesame Street - where he also got to sing with The Muppets in the final episode. He has also hosted a night at the Belfast Film Festival where he performed as a puppet of himself. The Duke is currently learning to swordfight for an upcoming on stage showdown with his long time nemesis, Neil Hannon of the Divine Comedy.

Duke Special is the fucked up ringmaster of a broken down circus, the lead dancer in a forgotten ballroom of ghosts, the loudest singer in a midnight choir and the first on his knees in an old time revival tent.
American Express — Are you a card member?

© 2010