Billy Nayer Show, Sxip! Matta with screening of The American Astronaut October 16, 2005

Driven by the creative pluralism of frontman Cory McAbee, the Billy Nayer Show has to its credit 15 years of music, artwork, books, cartoons, comic strips, short films, and the award-winning feature length film The American Astronaut. Critics have likened McAbee lyrically to William Blake and aesthetically to David Lynch. Neither comparison is quite right. Tonight, you can decide for yourself as both McAbee?s band and movie will be offered, with special guests SXIP! Matta.

Billy Nayer Show is a lyric-driven bass-drums-and-autoharp avant-rock trio that spins sonic yarns which have been described as elegant, psychotic, disturbing, absurd, and most lovingly ?hard to describe.? For reasons only Billy Nayer Show fans will understand, crowds have been known to hurl stuffed rabbits at the stage.

"The Great Billy Nayer Show" ? Filter

"Frightening yet endearing" ? The New Yorker

"Like co-productions of Kurt Weill and Neil Young" ? The Village Voice

"Indebted equally to Scott Walker?s bile-drenched crooning, Frank Zappa?s twisted surrealism, and Harry Nilsson?s deceptively sing-song melodicism"
? New York Magazine

The American Astronaut is a 91-minute space Western that follows the adventures of an interplanetary trader (McAbee) on his quest to provide the all-female population of Venus with a suitable male while evading a cold-blooded, if slightly childish, killer named Professor Hess (Rocco Sisto). Through gorgeous black and white photography, rugged Lo-Fi sets, riveting musical interludes, and McAbee?s wholly distinct artistic sensibility, The American Astronaut conjures the dirty, isolated vastness of the final frontier while creating a unique iconography that has spurned a rabid cult following.

"Something virtually unique in American independent film"
? Filmmaker Magazine

"Part western, part musical, part Kubrick, part Godard, very strange and very free" ? Newsday

"A tale that evokes Brecht, Beckett, and Ed Wood" ?
New York Times

"Imagine a long Laurel & Hardy skit directed by Salvador Dali" ? Entertainment Weekly

Sxip Shirey is a circus-music composer, performance artist, story teller, founder of the Luminescent Orchestrii, and a multi-instrumentalist unlike any you?ve ever seen. Using homemade instruments and unlikely detritus, Shirey creates aural landscapes that would make the Brothers Grimm thrill and tremble. Adam Matta is a Human Beat Box of exceptional talent. Their pairing is long overdue.

?[Sxip] conjures a world of infernal calliopes and cotton candy machetes wielded by Gypsy crones with angel feet.? ? SF Weekly

?Sxip has the incredible ability to turn the minds of his audience almost entirely inside out...? ? Nonsense NYC

?I've heard Sxip crank out gypsy-thrash tunes on his Mutant Harmonicas that would prompt the contents of your bowels to wriggle out of your colon and cut a goddamn rug...? Arts Journal

6:30 film; 8pm Sxip! Matta; 8:30pm Billy Nayer Show

www.galapagosartspace.com
www.billynayer.com
www.americanastronaut.com
www.sxipshirey.com