the wrens - New Jersey's got it

Benefit show for Sweet Home New Orleans 1/10/08

Charles — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 16:52:04 -0500

Howdy citizens of 2008,

Hoping your all your holidays and new year and stuff have been as nifty as our own. I got an actual stocking.

Just a quick little – yet important - news item for this next week. Charles has been invited along with an impressive handful of much cooler musicians (see below) to participate in a 3-day artist retreat and benefit show in New Orleans put together by the Future of Music Coalition and Air Traffic Control.

This retreat, the third since Katrina, is designed to promote social justice activism by musical artists and to encourage and facilitate the engagement and support of national artists with the local New Orleans music community as our community struggles to rebuild.

The retreat culminates in a benefit show for Sweet Home New Orleans (SHNO), an umbrella organization for 14 non-profit agencies serving New Orleans' music community. SHNO provides relocation, housing, and social services to musicians and tradition bearers in need. Thousands of New Orleans musicians have yet to find stable housing in their neighborhoods since the flood of 2005. SHNO's mission is to help these artists return to their communities, where they can revitalize the city and share their unique culture with future generations.

Details for the benefit show:

Indie Artists Perform Benefit for New Orleans Musicians Thursday, January 10 at The Parish @ House of Blues New Orleans 9:00pm

On January 10, at the House of Blues Parish Room,

Jon Langford & Sally Timms of The Mekons,
Patrick Hallahan of My Morning Jacket,
Charles Bissell of the Wrens,
Kimya Dawson (who recently contributed eight songs to the hit movie Juno),
Timothy Bracy of Mendoza Line,
Janet Bean of Freakwater
Craig Klein, Matt Perrine, Eric Bolivar & Bert Cotton of Bonerama
And as of today, Nellie McKay

…come together to play a benefit show for musicians displaced by Hurricane Katrina. Showtime is 9 pm.

Buy Tickets

Find out about Sweet Home New Orleans

And if you’re not in the neighborhood to make the show Thursday, consider donating online through their website.

Thanks as always and when we come back online a little later this month we’ll have some new muzak news for you.

take care,
the wrens

Wrens.com down tonight

Charles — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 17:46:47 -0500

Howdy,

Just a little warning that we're updating the software that runs our site so we'll be offline a little later today, Wednesday, 12/5/07. Shouldn't take more than a couple of hours.
Then hopefully some new (read: actual) news in the next week or two.

Thanks as always,
the wrens

CMJ loner show

Charles — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 13:12:24 -0400

Howdy,

In typical 11th-hour style, just letting you all know that Charles is playing a solo show tonight, Wed. 10/17, for the nice folks at Gothamist and WOXY who are holding court at White Rabbit (on Houston), lo this week of the CMJ Fest.

It’s a day-party-type thing so set time’s about 6:45pm.

And very honored to be taking up stage space before Rev. Billly and the Church of Stop Shopping. Great recent article on him here, also courtesy Gothamist.

The Forms, another great band, are also playing tonight and later in the week, the ongoing Gothamist/WOXY party will feature Palomar and Pattern is Movement (two faves) among a bunch of others.

To be forewarned, Chazzie cut a chunk off a fingertip chopping brussel sprouts two nights ago so all guarantees on quality-of-performance are even iffier than usual.

Meadowlands vinyl back in stock

Charles — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 15:03:18 -0400

For those of you who prefer your muzak storage mediums flat, round and on the dark side, the double-vinyl version of our Meadowlands album (w/ bonus songs) is back in stock.

Hope summer's been good to you.

a couple of benefit shows

Charles — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 21:33:53 -0400

Related to the story below regarding Bottom of the Hudson’s tragic accident, we’re doing a couple of benefit shows in September (details of both the accident and updates on news can be found on our label’s site,
Absolutely Kosher).

First, Charles is doing a solo show at Monkey Town in Williamsburg, Brooklyn this Wednesday, Sept. 5th.
This is the usual solo Charles thing with out-of-the-norm wrens songs into looping pedals but unusually this time, in collaboration with video artists Elizabeth Maertens and Phillip Kim who will be pushing Monkey Town’s four built-in video screens to their limits.
Also on this bill is Tris McCall (another of NJ’s own and a wonderful songwriter) and the really, really good Overlord.

Monkey Town is a very nifty venue and a very small one - reservations are required and seating is very limited.
But note that they’re currently having server problems with the online reservation form so best bets are to email reservation requests directly to:

monkeytownhq@aol.com

Whatever proceeds Charles drums up from this show will also be going to Trevor’s family and to help offset medical expenses for Bottom of the Hudson’s Greg Lytle, who was also seriously injured in the crash.

Secondly, the full Wren-ish band is doing a benefit show in Philadelphia with Man Man (amazingly good, if you haven’t seen them) and the A-Sides (about whom we’ve heard good things).
The show is at the First Unitarian Church on Thursday, September 20th and all proceeds will be donated to the family of Trevor Butler, Bottom of the Hudson’s bassist, who was killed in the accident.

Details for both shows can be found on our ’Tours’ page.

Also, even if you’re not able to make either of the shows, donations to Trevor’s family can still be made via PayPal to
both@absolutelykosher.com.

We hope you’ve been having a wonderful summer and we hope to be back soon with happier news.

Thanks as always,
the wrens

bottom of the hudson

Charles — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 13:07:01 -0400

By now many of you may have heard that Trevor Butler, the bass player for Bottom of the Hudson, died yesterday, June 29th, when their tour van went off the highway following a tire blowout.
The accident also injured others including their new drummer who is in critical condition at a nearby hospital:

the story via pitchfork.

We’ve known the Bottom Of The Hudson folks for a few years now, toured with them in spring of 2004, and they’re such good, good people and wonderful musicians. Our hearts and sympathies go out to them at this terrible time.

So very sad…

Bottom of the Hudson

Bottom of the Hudson at Absolutely Kosher

Our Four-Year, Weekends-Only Meadowlands Tour Wheezes to a Halt

Charles — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 11:44:54 -0400

After four years, some 160+ shows, roughly 10 countries, and a sultan’s variety of late-night snack foods, our four-year weekends-only tour for the Meadowlands wheezes to a halt with this weekend’s shows in Texas.

For details, click on the tours page right over there on the right...

We will have commemorative tour t-shirts coming to the site in the next couple of weeks (no, seriously) along with some other more forward-looking news and stuff.

For anyone that’s made the trek in the last few years to bear witness to our being our own cover band, sincere thanks. We hope we were good that night. But I do know we almost certainly had a wonderful time trying to be.

Sincerely,
four active seniors

almost last-minute show

Charles — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 22:48:24 -0400

June 15th: Brooklyn, NY

Charles solo, reworking the same older weirder wrens songs with the usual loops, pedals and crossed fingers.
(wth Cinema, Cinema; Peel; the Antlers)
At a nifty show put together by the good blogging folks of the Battering Room at Matchless in Greenpoint, Brooklyn

See the rest of the only weekend-only tour that predates....well, stuff that's about four years old. On the Tours page.

Tonight, live on the radio via the telephone

Charles — Thu, 31 May 2007 15:49:04 -0400

“Phoning It In’ is a nifty radio show from WMBR in Boston and WBSR in Providence where they have musicians engage in what they describe as ‘live over-the-phone performances and awkward conversation’.

Earlier last winter we did an unplugged performance on “Phoning It In” with Nadav Carmel on WMBR. It was a hoot and we definitely provided our share of awkward conversation and impossibly-long converstional pauses. And we played a few songs (we’re looking for the link for that one as we type this).

But tonight (Thursday, 5/31/07) at 9:00pm, Charles will do a few songs solo-wren-style for the partner show on WBSR with James Brandt.

When we asked James for the best way for folks to listen in, he had three options:

1) live stream by going to:
this stylish link for WBSR.
and clicking either Listen [HiFi] or [LoFi] at the top of the page.

2) [after the show’s over] archive by clicking archives on the side menu, scrolling to phoning it in, selecting a show.

3) driving to providence, RI, having a beer at the pirate bar and listening to 88.1fm

See you all in Providence…

Yet more shows.

Charles — Wed, 16 May 2007 13:19:02 -0400

As our beat-a-deadowlands-horse weekends-only tour lumbers on into its fourth year, we've added more of the usual here & there tour dates starting...well, tonight of course...

click on this blue thing for specifics