Kickstarter

Peeesseye's new record Pestilence & Joy is in the can (see the video for the title track above). All we need to do now is press the records so that you and 499 other people can put one on your turntable. That's where this Kickstarter campaign comes in. We've raised and invested a lot of money and time in this project already, completing the writing, recording, mixing, editing, and mastering of the music. But our budget is about $2500 short of the funds needed to complete Pestilence & Joy - for the pressing of the LPs, printing of the color sleeves, and shipping of the final product. With this Kickstarter campaign we are aiming to raise at least half of that amount - $1250 - to bring the project to completion, and enable us to publish this record. Please help by making a contribution to the Pestilence & Joy Fund and telling your friends about this project.

Here’s the back-story: 2008 and 2009 were banner years for Peeesseye. In May '08, we performed at the 25th Annual Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville, in Quebec, one of the premier avant-garde music festivals in North America. Later that summer, we were awarded the USArtists International grant from the National Endowment of the Arts and the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation to support Peeesseye’s three-week fall 2008 European tour, which included concerts at Colour Out of Space Festival in Brighton, UK, and ZXZW Festival in Tilburg, Netherlands. We also released two CDs of new material in 2008, both on our own Evolving Ear label, and designed and published our website www.peeesseye.com. 2009 has already seen the release of two live CDs from the Giant Tank and Golden Lab labels in the UK, and in December the final two volumes of a 6-cassette subscription documenting six live concerts on the Digitalis label will be released. Later this winter our collaborative studio album with Talibam! will also be released by Invada (CD) and Smeraldina Rima (double LP). And all of this happened while our once Brooklyn-based band members were moving to different time zones and continents. Jaime Fennelly has relocated from Brooklyn to Waldron Island, Washington, percussionist/vocalist Fritz Welch has moved to Glasgow, Scotland, and guitarist Chris Forsyth moved to Philadelphia in June. As you can imagine, this geographic separation presents new challenges to collaboration, but it has not slowed us down a bit. In fact, it’s been quite the opposite – our music is being more widely released than ever in 2009.

Which brings us to the Pestilence & Joy story: In order to take advantage of the time we were together for our fall 2008 tour, we spent three days recording at the STEIM studios in Amsterdam in September. Once we returned to our homes after the tour, we completed the project working together and independently and sharing files over the internet, combining the studio material from Amsterdam with remixed live recordings. English microtonal harmonica whiz Seamus Cater and the elusive cabaret art-rocker Richy Midnight each made crucial contributions to the tracks. Recording and mastering of this project is now complete and we’ve titled it Pestilence & Joy. We consider it an exciting development for the group and our most advanced and complete studio project to date. We’ve conceived of the project as an LP release in order to split the music across two sides of vinyl. And to take advantage of the broad 12-inch sleeve, we’ve commissioned the American artist team Matt Bua & Jesse Bercowetz and British illustrator Ronaldo Wright to each create a cover image for Pestilence & Joy. The final product will be printed on high quality full color sleeves and released as an edition of 500 copies on our Evolving Ear imprint - the home of much of Peeesseye's past work. Both musically and as an object, we anticipate the Pestilence & Joy LP to be an important statement by the group, one that will capture the attention of both our current audience and hopefully lead to wider exposure domestically and abroad. Please help us make it possible (and get some special Peeesseye swag for yourself in the process!).