"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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Many trace the band's origins back to a small barn in Hopewell Junction, NY circa 2002 where a small, but loyal experimental music scene began to emerge from the declining industrial landscape of nearby Poughkeepsie, a mostly white middle-class suburban community economically based mostly around the IBM plant on South Road (though increasingly characterized by corporate shopping plazas, megastores, and a massively overvalued real estate market).
With the local music scene marred by mookish hardcore thugs, yawn-inducing bar bands, tepid and awful singer-songwriters, and homogenized corporate radio stations, this small, culturally oppressed and creatively alienated community began to make small waves utside the perimeters of the recursive provincial music scene and under the radar of the local entertainment press (Pulse, Chronogram), whose sole existence was to rob rich white liberals of the tiny profits their small businesses in the area could muster. Though surrounded by a smattering of painfully insular liberal-arts colleges, the experimental musicians were mostly comprised of college-age dropouts, community college attendees, or recent grads who moved back to the area to figure themselves out.
Some were veterans of the punk and hardcore scenes, which had by this time become bloated with conformist indignation, saturated by tough guy caricature egos, and soured by a younger patriarchy looking for a comfortable form of violent antiestablishmentism. At the center of all this humorless self-parody was the Chance Complex (home of “The Shithole”), an architectural travesty with potential mob connections and a firm stranglehold on the Hudson Valley 's independent music scene. The Chance Complex (whose eponymous club was originally called “The Last Chance”) made its money by roping in recurring acts willing to play for nothing who would be awarded with a loyal fanbase whose devotion grew with each subsequent return the cultural wasteland of Poughkeepsie .
It was out of this environment that bands like Mr. Noise, m0dnAr, Humans Are the Worst Invention, and Zillion began to emerge. Aided by the Hudson Valley Experimental Arts Society (HvEXAS), shows spotlighting local and international artists (Prurient, Kouhei Matsunaga, Rumpelstirnz and Gurglestock, Borbetomagus, Guilty Connector, Government Alpha, Jazzkammer, Mindflayer) began to materialize from the margins of the Hudson Valley; in cafés, forgotten art galleries, roller rinks, radical collective spaces, overlooked community centers, and dingy biker bars. At the center of HvEXAS's grand social experiment was their house band Lunch With Beardo, a veritable slice of Americana pie (allegedly) from outer space.
What HvEXAS lacked in resources, Lunch With Beardo, like its terrestrial peers, made up for in sound. Piercing feedback, squealing horns, endlessly reverberated vocal moans, Klaatu-esque monologues, dubbed-out guitar strains, and hypnotically cryptic tape loops implying an obsession with the interpretation of intergalactic TV signals, (particularly from the 24 hour news networks, the food channels and the television show “Roseanne”) were dishes regularly served by the rotating crew of elusive figures in the Beardo cult.
It remains unclear whether the cult surrounding the Beardo sightings and the group itself are one and the same as the followers and participants are willing to reveal very little. It is only by the nature of their secrecy that the group has thus far been considered dangerous. The extreme aggression present in their louder performance pieces has lead some skeptics to conclude that the group is gearing up for some apocalyptic Jim Jones of Symbionese Liberation Army styled acts of fundamentalist fervor. Others dismiss the provocative Anticks of Lunch With Beardo's stage shows as mere theater, a form of role playing for latter-day hippies.
To make sense of the countercultural references and pop-cultural codes, the central intelligence networks have reportedly hired a group of “undercover” hipsters to better understand the occasional off-the-collar remark about Sun Ra, Huey Newton, or the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Through tireless research and endless hours logged, the hipsters have decoded several many of the references using a centralized network co-sponsored by the U.S. Government and Australian Secret Intelligence Services agent codenamed H. Cod Rum called “myspace.” The hipsters promise to unveil the list if the Beardo situation escalates into a public threat. For now, the Beardo camp has only issued the vaguely menacing statement “Never trust a hipster.”
Like rave culture in late 1980s Britain and the hip-hop house parties of late 1970s Brooklyn, Beardo sightings often pop up with little public notice, despite the tight network of Beardo cultists online at sites like www.lunchwithbeardo.com . This has resulted in a blackout of sorts in both the local and national press with regards to the Beardo phenomenon. One might even conclude that the Beardos want to spread their message exclusively via their preestablished network of working associates in FDH Records, HvEXAS, and other upstate New York outfits. Regardless, they have been particularly elusive to the music press, though sources close to the band say the outer space collective is plotting some major, bowel-shaking, hair-raising gestures in the very near future.
For now though, all is calm in the forgotten plains of nowheresville. Show less