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Lunch With Beardo

"Without Lunch, Life Would be a Mistake"

Not much is known about the bizarre fringe group known as Lunch With Beardo or the small quasi-religious cult following closely associated with their numerous public appearances, also known as "sightings." The young alien types who attend their public gatherings report that the group regularly visits from the Planet Lunch to spread a message of hope, food, and facial hair. Little else is known specifically about the group and much of the information that sources do have come from scratchy bootleg-quality cassette and CD-R releases unearthed from unnamed sources by the decentralized, self-proclaimed "art-terrorist" independent label FDH Records. The tapes and CD-Rs have been reproduced and redistributed in various locations across the east coast, though FDH claims they are not profiting off sales of the tapes.

All of this secrecy has lead some to believe that the sightings are actually an elaborate hoax and the Beardo phenomenon is no more than the collective musings and pretensions of a gaggle of musicians and artists based out of upstate New York . Many of the organizers of the Beardo "sightings" have been identified as musicians involved in previous punk, electro, avant-garde, metal, and tube-based outfits based in New York 's Hudson Valley region (eg. Jesse Heffler, Eric "The Ill" Hansen, Jeff Bumiller, Jon "Wazoo" Duelks, Timh Gabriele- See below for more details). The accusations are further supported by a purported classified investigation into the group by several secret central intelligence networks that found no evidence of spacecraft or extraterrestrial intelligence, though the group was said to have been kept under a surveillance list of potential subversives and was found to have a "troubling" relationship to the world of psychotropic drugs.

Regardless of the veracity of the reports from either camps, the Lunch With Beardo mythology and audiology has added an interesting chapter to the long tradition of the musical avant-garde, with origins tracing back to various working-class "outsider" artists and University-based musique concretists of the early 20th century through the messthetics and jam-based dirges of Krautrock, Space Rock, and Post-Punk and up to the current psychedelic strains that permeate through the Post-Rock and Noise movements. The ebb and flow of a Lunch With Beardo "performance" can fluctuate from a whimsical, melancholic glissando along the lines of, say, a Silver Mt. Zion record, to an orgiastic bedlam of Acid Mothers Temple-tinged freakouts complete with violent tantrums of anarchic food-tossing, instrument-wailing, and uncontrolled satanic chanting about peanut butter soldiers, the tyranny of shaving, or Karl Rove's vagina. One Lunch With Beardo sighting is like no other, which may be why participants in the group's gatherings have become so fervently and intimately attached to the group.

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