Dan Stuart

Event information

What business does an aging post-punk has-been have making a kick-ass rock record with Twin Tones, one of Mexico's hottest young bands? Last anyone heard, Green on Red's Dan Stuart had moved to Oaxaca from NYC to escape reality, not that anyone cared. Sure, after a decade and a half gone missing, he had released both the LP and book, ‘The Deliverance of Marlowe Billings’, in 2012 and 2014 respectively on Cadiz Music in London, but outside of some grudging critical respect, really a sympathy fuck for days gone by, plus some sporadic touring, well the planet could get along without Stuart's morbidly self-righteous world view just fine. His inability to lighten-up and endure life's little insults like the rest of us had grown old and tired, like Stuart himself. Okay, you went away, now go away. Still he refused...

‘Marlowe's Revenge’ started in a concrete bunker in Oaxaca, where Daniel Sanchez Jimenez was more used to recording Oaxacan banda than depressed gabachos. Stuart wandered in one day with a dozen songs written on an opened tuned cracked Martin that mirrored Stuart's psyche perfectly. The old gringo made the young engineer accompany him live with a 10 peso little black egg shaker or beat on an ancient phone book with an open palm... he was a card carrying union percussionist after all. The result was promising. The songs were about love and loss, murder and revenge: Stuart's usual laments but with a spark, like a fire had been lit somewhere deep in his distended belly. Pleased with the results, Stuart became curious and wondered if he could find a band to play some of these songs, a Mexican band that wasn't a caricature of Mexico herself. So he did what anyone would do, search Youtube and he found them...

Their name was Twin Tones. They came from Mexico City and played instrumental music with some of the same Ital-Mex influences as the last band Stuart had recorded with, Sacri Cuori from Italy. But they were younger and rawer, and spoke little English but with a rock n roll accent. Stuart sent them a FB message and barely got back a reply, yes we have a studio and we do our own thing, who the fuck are you? Now this is where it gets weird... turns out they had mutual friends and acquaintances, people like Steve Wynn from The Dream Syndicate and Danny Amis from Los Straitjackets, the world was indeed a frighteningly small place. So on his way to Europe to play some loserfest, Stuart dropped by the lads studio in gritty Ecatepec and started the second half of Marlowe's Revenge.

The first song they recorded together was Soy Un Hombre, and it was immediately clear they had a garagey sound but one in England somewhere and rented from gypsies. Pleased, Stuart sent Twin Tone's leader and now his producer Gabriel Lopez some of the Oaxacan tapes and told him to overdub what he wanted, make yourself a nice margarita. The results blew Stuart away and so the whole enchilada was smuggled up north to JD Foster to mix and the rest is... well not history exactly but still something worth listening to if you give a shit about stuff like this.




Fernando ’s new album ‘Leave The Radio On’ has been three years in the making, and is a virtual who's who of Portland Oregon's finest musicians, including Peter Buck (on 8 tracks) and Scott McCaughey of REM, Sarabeth Tucek as well as members of M.Ward, Elliott Smith, Richmond Fontaine/The Delines bands. Willy Vlautin of Richmond Fontaine says “Pacific Northwest legend, Fernando has made the best record of his life. One of my all time favorite singer-songwriters”

Fernando Viciconte, the Portland, Oregon troubadour with twenty years of US acclaim under his belt, crawls from the wreckage of the recent past unbowed to release his eight album and his first ever outside the US. Bruised, but unbroken. The good news is that he has survived major surgery for a throat condition and what could have been existential silence for ‘that voice’ and kept him off touring for years. It’s a voice that caused countless magazines and fellow musicians to rave about the feeling it evokes when Fernando sings his songs of dark despair and faint hope. This is a new chapter in Fernando's ever-evolving musical trajectory, a career marked by creative integrity and an almost painful honesty which attracts fans from high and low that still believe in the redemptive power of rock and roll.

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