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featherbeard

General Info

  • Genre: Melodramatic Popular Song / Psychedelic / Religious

    Location The Angels of Light, California, Un

    Profile Views: 31632

    Last Login: 8/7/2011

    Member Since 8/19/2006

    Website www.featherbeard.org

    Type of Label Major

  • Bio

    Featherbeard is a minstrel and storyteller of the Neolithic variety. Culling influences from as far a field as Hindu mystics, Tiny Tim, habanero peppers and demonic ghosts, his incantations tightrope the archaic and the innovative. They are both steeped in and unmoored by time, playful and cryptic, lyrical and delusional. Birthed in Chicago's South Side slums, the child of a pig slaughterer and a cross-dressing performance artist, Featherbeard train-hopped to New Orleans where he made a name for himself playing for hillbillies and gutter punks. In Louisiana, Featherbeard spent months traversing the labyrinth of bayou towns, busking his way across the Gulf Coast. It's in the Deep South beneath the summer storms and amongst the ringing echoes of an African spiritual tradition never to be lost that his songwriting turned lush and bloomed: a phonographic floral child of the eternal whisper. But like so many musical birdies, Featherbeard desired the deserts and mountains of the West. His paeans speak in deep, baritone ruminations, perfectly suited for the vistas of southern California, his current nesting spot. It's in Los Angeles that Featherbeard fully cultivated his euphonious sermons, which now include whale calls, bird chips, and a variety of earthly utterances. Songs cease to be mere compositions, but are part of an evolutionary process, sprung from earth. Performed on steel stringed guitar, ukulele, upright bass, buffalo drum, mountain dulcimer, auto harp, harmonica and kazoo, the hymns are organic. And that's what in the end makes Featherbeard unique – his songs have roots. Having contracted a rare allergy to digital recording when he was seventeen years old after reading that "a poem translated is like a star drawn in charcoal, holding all the shape but none of the light," Featherbeard was forced to wait before he could create his first recording. And then it came to be. He was called to Beverly Hills to a wondrous four track and a studio with a huge bass drum and a rusty trumpet where he recorded and mixed two full-length lps on honest and impressionable audio tape, in 4-D. The process is, as of yet, not complete; Destiny has not yet finished the paperwork to bring the word to true flesh, and so the recordings have been conservatively distributed as digital media (each time causing the singer to break out in a minor rash). In the meantime, Featherbeard performs. Wearing pretty dresses and homemade feather beards, the weird man must be seen to be understood. As were it not for the beautiful shine he has seen in the eyes of hopeful observers and the inspiration he has received from this vision, the performances may have by now ceased. Yet love and awe have been passed around this way. His mouth, their ears, their mouths, his ears, a cycle of joyful noise revolves and an electro-magnetic current is sustained. Beneath many moons he has sung, strummed, and plucked as single seated body wanting little distraction from the word and its conjoined twin—beauteous melody—but as of late the word has received foundational support: a band is formed. Alongside him now often sits a beautiful maiden, a daughter of May, beating a drum and singing an aviary harmony; also a young curly-headed medium, a prodigious maker, bowing his beautiful upright bass; also a multi-lingual guitarist picking in French, Spanish, Hindi, Hebrew, or English, rhythms of fortune and delight. Other times, he may be seen with a lone electric guitarist rubbing a swirling and distorted Om from his wood and steel machine. California, India, Chicago and New York. A Chinese tour is in the works. In any fashion, Featherbeard performs. And as long as there are hearts willing to swell and minds ready to twist inside out, Featherbeard performs. .. .. .. .. .. .. ..
  • Members

    Featherbeard, your pumping hearts
  • Influences

    Mountain Angels, John Jacob Niles, Giuseppe Verdi, Crickets, Oceans, Mountains, Rivers, Kundalini, Floods, Fires, Famines, Love, Voodoo, Demons, Betrayal, Suffering, Time, Death, Flowers, Josephine Foster, Feathers, Charles Manson, Oscar the Grouch, Cumin, Dr. John
  • Sounds Like

    Gypsy Ghosts, The Dying Breath of Black Magic Capitalism, Arthritic Skeletons, Wandering Menstrual Cyclists, Orpheus Birds, Juniper Fires, Whale Women

Videos

00:00 | 0 plays | Jan 1 0001

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Comments

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  • House of Light

    hi featherbeard. nice to meet you. and ill give u advice for touring berlin like i said. J for HOL.

    2 years ago
  • The Active Set

    The new song is here. Come have a listen. Are you into it? Listen here: http://www.theactiveset.com Buy here: http://bit.ly/ltgb_itunes

    2 years ago
  • Timothy Michael Sanders

    Oh okay. I really like how it sounds.

    2 years ago
  • The Body Parts

    Prospector this Tuesday with Detangler, and The Year Zero. 

    3 years ago
  • Timothy Michael Sanders

    What is the instrument you're playing on Dream Baby Dreem? 

    3 years ago
  • Letters

    Wonderfully wondrous show the other night. We must share a bill again soon.

    3 years ago
  • Ҭ E Д Д D О Ԉ Д


    Morceau d'Apprenti
    Apprentice Piece, Pezzo di apprendista,
    Lehrlingstück, Pedazo de aprendi
    z.


    L'Apprenti
    présente ce travail muet, naïf, et parmi un choeur silencieux (un choeur
    complèt de gens qui sont énergiquement et physiquement présent mais
    sonorement nul). J'apprends à être comme un apprenti.

    L'Apprendista
    presenta questo lavoro senza parole, ingenuo, e fra un coro
    silenzioso (un coro raccolto di persone che sono con vigore e fisicamente
    attuale ma sonicamente nullo). Imparo a essere come un apprendista.

    El Aprendiz
    presenta este trabajo mudo, ingenuo, y entre un coro silencioso
    (un coro completo de personas que son presenta físicamente y energéticamente
    pero sónicamente nulo). Aprendo a ser como un aprendiz.

    Der Lehrling
    überreicht diese Arbeit wortlos, naiv, und unter einem schweigsamen
    Chor (ein gesammelter Chor von Leuten, der energisch und physisch ist, überreicht
    aber schall nichtig). Ich lerne, als ein Lehrling zu sein.

    The Apprentice
    presents this work wordless, naive, and among a silent choir
    (a collected choir of people who are energetically and physically present but
    sonically null.) I am learning to be as an apprentice.


    3 years ago
  • 3 years ago
  • Ellie Fortune

    With you!  FEB 25th at Echo Curio!


    3 years ago
10 of 305More

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