JOHN FELL RYAN @ fingered gallery, 1/15 - 2/15/10

Posted: January 14th, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , | No Comments »

JOHN FELL RYAN
Selected Millennial Works, Words, and Visions

January 15 - February 15, 2010

Fingered Gallery

309 Jefferson Street #1R Brooklyn NY 11237

by appointment only - (646) 508-3048 / info@fingeredmedia.com

John Fell Ryan lives in Brooklyn, New York. He is best known for his band, Excepter, whose new album will be released by Paw Tracks on Presidents Day, February 15th, 2010.

from Sweet Pea Review….

“In the early years of the Twenty-First Century, as attention fell upon various Brooklyn bands who circumscribed the borough’s Indie rut with divers methods of effacing the divide between popular and experimental musics - namely, Black Dice, Animal Collective, Oneida, Gang Gang Dance, Sightings, Mouthus, Double Leopards - one group, Excepter, stood apart with their deeply-evocative, yet disarmingly-blunt, music and, in turn, the rigorous and meticulous presentation of said music. The band uses electronics and vocals, with on occasion other instruments - an ostensible approach that would not necessarily distinguish the group. But beneath the surface, any other effort at analysis has proved to be hopelessly arcane. We could say Excepter is many things - “things” in this case being our proscribed music-cultural movements, aesthetic styles, and methods of instrumentation and composition - of which we would include: Improvised Electro-Acoustic, Noise, Industrial, Experimental Electronica, Dub, House, Electro, Techno. Any way, in contemporary music Excepter are simply incomparable. Though, one could hazard to explain the connections between Excepter and certain other collectively-improvising (and -branded) groups who in their genre-obvliousness easily eclipse the excessively-conservative, academic-minded experimental scenes of the 1990’s, all the while avoiding the new century’s vogue for Noise as music and “noise” as conceptual bugbear: for example, Supersilent, Polweschel, Thuja, Charalambides, Jackie-O Motherfucker, Pelt, The Vibacathedral Orchestra. Excepter also drew the inevitable attention that came from its leader, John Fell Ryan, once having been a member of The No-Neck Blues Band - an exemplary group who have bridged the gap between Rock and Improvised music better than any other, making such categorizing null and void (ideally, that is) and clearing the space in which these other similar groups could either make their mark, radically change their methods, or achieve a signifiance beyond the purview of even the artists themselves. Moreover, Excepter (as well as Animal Collective) engage with the human voice - and, thus, popular-music and other song-composing traditions - to a greater extent than the rest of these artists.”