On our winter tour back in December, we had the opportunity to visit Rock Island, IL and perform a raw and lively session at the Daytrotter studio. It's now streaming on their site, and if you're not a Daytrotter subscriber yet, I'd highly recommend it.
http://www.daytrotter.com/#!/concert/bent-knee/21021842-37388778
They also painted us in watercolors, which is pretty great.
A few months back, Ben Levin Group filmed a live in-studio performance of the recently released Freak Machine at The Record Company in Boston, MA. You can view the first movement at http://youtu.be/SYw3gdMwro0
The second video will be released next week, which subsequent movements to follow.
The music video (directed by Greg Bowen) for Movement I can be viewed at http://youtu.be/5t0ex229Pkk
Edit 022115: The second movement has just been released and can be viewed at http://youtu.be/v2pvF_bG7Q8
Edit 030115: The third movement can be viewed at http://youtu.be/-1XuDMsYNks
Due to the impending blizzard & MBTA shutdown, Secret Dog Brigade's launch party has been moved to Thursday, April 2nd. Stay warm, and if it's any consolation, you can curl up to Bent Knee's newly released concert film "Live at Davis Square Theatre" this weekend in the comfort of your own home.
The next Ben Levin Group show is Wednesday, February 18th at Midway Cafe in Jamaica Plain, MA.
Bent Knee's next performance is Saturday, February 28th at Hand Forged Works in North Andover, MA.
The Boston Globe recently talked with Ben Levin and I about the new label/collective/community we're launching on Sunday, February 15th. You can read the full article here. More information on Secret Dog Brigade can be found at secretdogbrigade.com
In 2015, record labels are a rather quaint idea. The antiquated notion of a defined career path — getting discovered while playing local gigs, riding off into the nurturing arms of a deep-pocketed and well-staffed imprint that will take care of the rest — has been replaced by an Internet-based DIY ethos, in which bands are left on their own to fight for whatever they can get, whether that’s as significant as booking a show or as fleeting as collecting a few coveted Facebook “likes.”
For musician-composer Ben Levin, try multiplying those responsibilities by five — the number of projects the Berklee grad divides his time among. There’s his own Ben Levin Group, which uses the same personnel as his other band, experimental outfit Bent Knee, plus playing guitar in That One Eyed Kid, the pop-based brainchild of Josh Friedman, who also works in both aforementioned bands. Levin and his collaborators might not have needed a conventional label to make sense of their tangled web, but they needed something.
“We call it a label because we can’t think of another amazing name for it,” says Levin, on the phone, about Secret Dog Brigade, the imprint-cum-artistic community he and the members of the five affiliated bands — Bent Knee, Ben Levin Group, That One Eyed Kid, Justice Cow, and Mr. Gavin’s Meat Farm — are launching together. “We are so interconnected with who’s in what band in the first place. It’s kind of an uncommon situation in today’s music economy, where it’s a lot of people coming out on their own, putting singles out on their own, or being in just one band. But to be so closely knitted in all these bands and have to obey the laws of physics, the only way for it to make it work is to be seen as one thing, even though we are many things.”
Think of it as the Wu-Tang Clan of the local indie scene: a collection of unique artists with individual pursuits made stronger by assembling under a single banner that ties them all together. Since meeting at Berklee, the eight musicians spread across the five groups — Levin, Friedman, Chris Baum, Courtney Swain, Gavin Wallace-Ailsworth, Jessica Kion, Kyle Harris, and Vince Welch — have regularly collaborated. Levin hopes that creating Secret Dog Brigade will clarify the presentation of all their various musical identities.
“Everyone has been stubbornly doing what they set out to do musically, but I think by banding together we help people realize we aren’t all one-trick ponies necessarily,” he explains. His group’s new record, “Freak Machine,” will be the inaugural Secret Dog Brigade release. “If you describe it as a creative community with no stylistic rules, it’s not confusing; it’s just people making different music. People don’t have to explain why we do what we do in terms of styles, they explain in terms of our friendship, like we are a team.”
But Secret Dog Brigade’s greater impact could come outside of their music. Levin and Chris Baum, violinist for Bent Knee and consequently Ben Levin Group, both see SDB as more than a home for themselves, but as a organization that can connect like-minded Boston creatives to share information, pool resources, or simply get together in the same room.
“The idea of the collective was partially to share information, partially to get this organizing unit behind what all of us were doing, and kind of to create this centralized point for all of our various projects,” says Baum. “We are all good at creating, but tying the rest together is often very challenging and vague. The industry is changing so quickly, and the outlets you need to reach are changing so rapidly, that just having this community where you can bounce ideas off each other and kind of figure out what has or hasn’t worked, it can help everyone in their business of making a living as a creative.”
Baum describes SBD’s potential programs as ranging from producing educational videos on music-business topics to helping out-of-town bands find local opening acts, and to events such as their ongoing “Improv Pot Luck” parties, in which musicians are drawn together at random to play together for five minutes with no preparation. Considering the participants have their own careers to worry about, it’s an unusually altruistic approach.
“I just always think if you want good things to happen, then you go and share,” says Levin. “Anything I have to brag about at all is because I didn’t think too much about reserving my assets.
“We don’t want this collective to be very insular, where we are deciding what should happen with SDB and what information we should be presenting to people,” Baum explains. “I’d like everyone to come at us with questions, and get more and more people into answering and asking questions and creating conversations, rather than us just presuming our knowledge.”
Ultimately, the launch of Secret Dog Brigade isn’t meant to reaffirm the importance of record labels in a traditional sense. If anything, it proves that something better could replace them.
“The more of a community that you can build, and more people you have connections to and help out, especially in the creative world, the more it’s going to come back and help you,” says Baum. “The more we can do for the Boston music scene, the more the scene can do for us.”
-Martín Caballero, Globe Correspondent | Feb 12, 2015
Happy Valentine's Day, lovers. Bent Knee's upcoming concert film Live at Davis Square Theatre will stream in its entirety February 14th at bentkneemusic.com
A cut from the show (Sunshine) is available to watch now at http://youtu.be/XR-Pgv7daVM
Update 021415
The full-length concert film can be streamed at http://youtu.be/WWHymEnu_LE until February 17th.
Allston Pudding has just premiered the new music video for Ben Levin Group's Freak Machine.
http://allstonpudding.com/video-premiere-ben-levin-group-freak-machine/
"Not for the faint of heart, the video by Greg Bowen features multiple computer monitors, skittles, lots of blood, and Ronald Reagan in lingerie drag. The editing techniques and set design create an uneasy vibe that work perfectly with the constantly evolving experimental prog rock track, oh and there’s also an incredible video game sequence! The 9-minute piece serves as part 1 of the four movement, thirty five minute epic Freak Machine.
Composer and guitarist Ben Levin has been writing long-form works since 2010’s Pulse of a Nation, each piece continuing to escalate in scope and scale. The band – Jed Lingat (bass), Courtney Swain (vocals), Josh Friedman (keyboards), Chris Baum (violin) and Tyler LeVander (drums) – all Berklee College of Music alumni, dazzle as well, navigating the score’s complexity with ease."
Watch the video at http://youtu.be/5t0ex229Pkk