| Begushkin is the masterwork of Brooklyn's swinging sultan, multi-instrumentalist and masterful songwriter Dan Smith & friends. Begushkin's debut full length Nightly Things is an 8 track journey into a creepy & disturbing surreal nightlife full of enemies, coarse love, and violence delivered with both a manic desperation and deadpanned absurdity that's augmented by Smith's intricate guitar picking & a woman's mournful harmonies. Nightly Things is a twisted stroll through the cadaver of the american psyche. Folk song is recast in a witches brew of electric psychedelic nuance and middle eastern & eastern European musical influences. The result is a beautifully disorienting trek through a musical landscape that's immediately striking & creepy.
It’s also a record that almost never happened. In an age when even the most ordinary items seems to have a back up or a double, we have only chance & good fortune to thank for the existence of this album. On a Saturday last November, Begushkin front man Dan Smith was awakened amidst clouds of dark smoke. His Brooklyn apartment was burning down. Dan grabbed a duffel bag and stuffed some clothes in it as he and a companion dashed out of the burning building. He lost everything. 300 pages of a novel in progress, a large collection of exotic instruments from around the world, a sizeable record collection, an irreplaceable Guild Starfire 4 electric guitar, a poetry manuscript, sketches of songs & reels upon reels of audio recordings. Thanks to the technologies that be, Dan had burned a copy of the Nightly Things for a friend in early Fall and now it's available for all ears to give a listen to. If ever there was a sign of an object willing itself into existence, this was it. |
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