Status: Single
City: NEW YORK
Country: US
Signup Date: 10/23/2004
|
|
|
|
Friday, January 30, 2009
|
Current mood:steatopygous
Category: Food and Restaurants
taken from junkmedia.org
enjoy!
Bellmer DollsDeath Becomes Them.Outside
a dive bar in Williamsburg, two towering rockers from New York band
Bellmer Dolls alternate between cell phones and cigarettes. The first,
Peter Mavrogeorgis, has the air of a Greek Adonis, built and tan with
black wavy locks swept over his forehead.
"I'm still shell-shocked" says Mavrogeorgis, the band's
frontman, of the deafening level of the jukebox, still audible from
inside.
Bassist Anthony Malat, with tattooed arms and a sandy handlebar
moustache and goatee, nods. He looks like the sort of guy who might
have killed a man in Reno. They mutually conclude that a quieter
setting is in order. Malat, who turns out to be much more the lamb than
the lion, offers the studio space where he designs menswear under the
moniker Sinner/Saint. They climb into Mavrogeorgis's two-door black
car, and head out to pick up drummer Daniel Sheerin. Onstage Sheerin tends to be the most dapper of the bunch,
Beatles haircut coupled with Malat's more posh designs, but tonight he
wanders out of his building in an oft-washed black skeleton t-shirt,
tight jeans, and beat up black boots. He crawls into the backseat as
they discuss beverage options. After much deliberation on beer, the gang settles in at
Malat's studio. The mostly bare white room mingles grandmother's
sitting room of floral sofa and woven rug with meticulously organized
tailor's shop, full of racks of men's jackets featuring contrast
stitching, decorative cuffs, and buttons galore. The three begin to finish each other's sentences while
reminiscing on how they began working together. Mavrogeorgis had long
admired Malat from various shared bills, Malat playing in Love Life,
and Mavrogeorgis in the Vanity Set with Bad Seeds/Grinderman member and
Dolls' producer Jim Sclavunos. "I got to play a show at a silly party called Rubulad with the
Vanity Set, and Love Life played their last show there. They were
already on the outs, and Anthony was pretty insufferable to the
audience onstage, and I just felt love," Mavrogeorgis says. "I never
saw anyone treat an audience with that much disrespect and still pull
off just a really, really good show."
Malat and Mavrogeorgis joined forces in 2003 and began
searching for the right drummer, but were disappointed to find no
suitable candidates through word of mouth. After battling writer's
block and creating one nonsensical Craigslist ad, the pair posted a
classified that simply listed their body of work. "Ironically, the one that I responded to was actually not in the musicians one but in the Casual Encounters," Sheerin says.
"Oh shut up," Mavrogeorgis laughs.
"That was because we got really desperate," Malat says.
"It was like, 'Two bottom twinks looking for man to take
charge.' And I was like - alright, it's Saturday night. I'm lonely.
What the hell?" Sheerin smirks.
"Well, no music got played the first time we got together
anyway," Mavrogeorgis admits. The two had reached an epiphany while
pouring money into testing drummers in their rehearsal space: they
decided that they wanted more than just a band. The Dolls have, in
fact, recently promoted their van driver up to stage presence due to
his chemistry with the already established threesome. Gabriel Guerena
now plays anything from the keyboards to the maracas with the band
live.
"Because you have to be so in tune with that person that even
if that person played their instrument better than anyone, ever... If
you can't deal with them, you can't deal with them, and you're going to
get out of the band sooner or later," Malat says. "And I feel at this
point that I don't want to have a first gig. I don't want to have a
first recording session."
Mavrogeorgis nods. "We decided, Anthony and I, that we really
weren't going to bring people to the rehearsal studio anymore. I mean,
first of all, we didn't have the money," he says. "So what we did was
we'd have people to my apartment at the time, and we'd just hang out
with them. Dan was the only one that we liked, who made it to actually
coming to rehearsal space with us. And he wasn't the best and he wasn't
the worst. But he was just the one."
The band were also fortunate in recruiting producer Sclavunos,
who they credit with salvaging a lot of the unfinished writing for
their upcoming LP Galatea. He fits in seamlessly, but also coaxes out some dysfunction in this tight musical family.
"I think he sees in Dan the son that he probably will never have," Mavrogeorgis says. "I watch him torture Dan."
They all laugh. "There was this one time that I was trying to
overdub this strange snare roll and he wasn't pressing record. He kept
pressing play on it, and he was like, 'You're fucking up in the same
way you fucked up last time.'" Sheerin says. "It happened, like, five
times and by the fifth one, I was like - this is insane. Something is
wrong!" Mavrogeorgis howls with laughter.
A week before the intimate gathering at Malat's workspace, the
Bellmer Dolls packed a set in the cavernous downstairs dungeon of Lit
Lounge. Clad head to toe in black, the three blazed through several new
tracks and a couple of holdovers from their The Big Cats Will Throw Themselves Over EP.
Mavrogeorgis, perched upon an amplifier and hanging off of the
bar's dingy overhead pipes, purred and pounced his way through the
songs, swapping between guitar and a small synthesizer set. His
performance hinted at Peter Murphy in the opening of midnight vampire
classic The Hunger. Sheerin pounded and punched his drum kit
with a quiet fury. Malat spent most of the show with his lanky frame
doubled backwards, laying down the basslines that anchor the band, and
keeping them from drifting into an all-night orgy of complete musical
debauchery.
The Dolls are so dubbed in homage to Hans Bellmer, a German
artist who created life-size nude girl dolls as a protest against the
Third Reich in the 1930s. The dolls would be in some sense deformed,
sometimes headless or their arms would be placed where legs should be,
presenting a perfect antithesis to the Aryan ideal.
Bellmer's new namesakes insist that they aren't making a
political statement with their title, simply paying tribute to a
brilliant artist. "More than it being protest for me was that the
nature of his protest was to take something that is grotesque and show
it in a new light, which was really more beautiful than anything
terrestrial that we might consider beauty to be," Mavrogerogis says. "I
guess what we don't like is complacency. We're not complacent. Ever."
There's a definite resistance to pandering among this group,
but a grounded acknowledgement of realities. "Protest against the
banal. Fine," Mavrogeorgis says. "At the same time, when Jim said, 'Do
you mind singing that twice?' We were like, 'Uh, we already sang that
part...' Well, can you do it again? It becomes a chorus!"
"Yeah, we're like, chorus?" says Malat. Despite their
insistence in avoiding many artistic norms and clichés, the group
realizes some concessions must be made.
"You have to gain the audience in order to fuck up the audience," Sheerin says.
With fewer than six degrees of separation between the Dolls and
Nick Cave, certain comparisons seem inescapable. "I have been plagued
by Birthday Party references since I was 20 or 19. I personally don't
see that, but I stopped listening to that band when I was 17," Malat
says. "As far as what our influences are, we all come from such a
totally different place. Generally, we kind of hate the music that each
other like."
The three agree on a Glen Campbell track called "If This Is
Love," one mix tape that was stolen along with their van and all of
their equipment about five years ago, and almost nothing else. The
sound that emerges is a dark and grimy blues-rock that manages to be
sonically original while bearing echoes of many predecessors. These
ghosts of music past range from 80s Australian post-punkers the
Moodists to Robert Johnson to, indeed, the Birthday Party.
Admittedly, the lads do have some quirks that place them in the
somewhat eccentric tradition of their influences and peers. Malat, who
was ordained as a minister in the Universal Life Church in order to wed
some of his former bandmates, for a time owned a skeleton named
Cornelius in preparation for his own afterlife. "He was a really quiet roommate for a good three years," Malat says.
"He
even lived at my parents for a while," Mavrogeorgis says of Cornelius's
sojourn on Long Island during the construction of their recording
studio in his parents' house. "I guess you would say he was a consultant on the actual layout of the studio."
"I swear he was making noises once when I was upstairs sleeping."
Malat says, without the slightest bit of shock, "That has been told to me."
Mavrogeorgis laughs, "I lost it. I actually drove all the way back to the fucking city."
"You could reach," Sheerin faux yawns, "over and be like, 'Oh, you feel skinny tonight.'"
"Yeah
totally. You're a little cold, honey," Mavrogeorgis says. "Talk about
the afterlife, you know, Jim was trying to find a website once. He was
convinced that there was this website where you could sell your body to
necrophilia." "There isn't? There's gotta be! There is," Sheerin insists.
"Yeah,
Jim and I were going to do it and then we just couldn't figure it out,"
Mavrogeorgis says. "I guess I'm not getting any after I die." Perhaps necrophilia is not in the cards, but the Bellmer
Dolls are satisfied with the lifetimes that they have ahead of them.
These three lads have been through a lot together, from psychotic
girlfriends to family illnesses to physical altercations in foreign
countries. "The music that we come up with and the arguments that we
have are amazing," says Malat. "They're very, very colorful and
everything, but at the end of the day, we all bail each other out of a
whole lot of shit, and we're willing to do that until we all die off."
Peter laughs. "We get to do this forever."
--Photo by Zina Brown
Jenna Payne
January 30, 2009
4:17 PM
Powered by  | | English | | Albanian | | Arabic | | Bulgarian | | Catalan | | Chinese | | Croatian | | Czech | | Danish | | Dutch | | Estonian | | Filipino | | Finnish | | French | | Galician | | German | | Greek | | Hebrew | | Hindi | | Hungarian | | Indonesian | | Italian | | Japanese | | Korean | | Latvian | | Lithuanian | | Maltese | | Norwegian | | Polish | | Portuguese | | Romanian | | Russian | | Serbian | | Slovak | | Slovenian | | Spanish | | Swedish | | Thai | | Turkish | | Ukrainian | | Vietnamese |
|
|
|