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Mega Bog

Saturday 16th November 2019

+ M. Butterfly

At The Rose Hill

Doors 8:00 pm

Price £8 + booking fee / £10 on the door 

Melting Vinyl is proud to present:

Mega Bog is the fluid musical moniker of songwriter Erin Elizabeth Birgy, a Pacific Northwestern rodeo child with an unmistakable laugh, who was allegedly cursed upon conception. She has spent the last ten years channeling, capturing, and releasing her unique bouquet of fragrant, sci-fi pop experiments with a handful of bicoastal collaborators. Mega Bog has visited a significant portion of the Western world, frequently looping the USA and Europe to sing in tiny art spaces and haunted historical theaters alike. The live concerts are known for their emotional unpredictability. Onstage, Erin’s current mood is amplified, for better or for worse; she is an honest and unflinching performer.

The title of Mega Bog’s newest album Dolphine—her fifth, and first for Paradise of Bachelors—is inspired by a myth that suggests that, as humankind evolved from sea creatures, some individuals chose not to leave the water and walk the earth, but rather to stay in the ocean and explore the darkness as dolphins. (The extra ‘e’ was added to take the word out of the everyday, translating it into a potential futuristic dialect.) Dolphine is an album for the swimming human shadow obscured by waves. The songwriting was inspired by Erin’s own swim through a myriad of overwhelming emotions, including the ongoing mourning following the death of her childhood horse companion Rose, her navigation of the feelings and physicality of two abortions, and the hapless and shattering social, political, and environmental turmoil on the planet known as Earth.

In October of 2016, Erin took her dark sketches to the Outlier Inn studio in Woodridge, NY, with a passionate crew of deeply bonded musicians. Together, they arranged and executed these eleven dizzy pop songs, live, over a tight seven days. In addition to Birgy (vocals, guitar, piano), the lineup included Meg Duffy (guitar), Matt Bachmann (bass), Derek Baron (drums), James Krivchenia (engineering, percussion, effects), Aaron Otheim(synthesizers, piano), and Ash Rickli (guitar and vocals). Later, Will Murdoch (clarinet, synthesizers) and Zach Burba (synthesizers, bass) offered their own atmospheric overdubs from their home on the West Coast. Over the next year, Erin added to the tapestry with vocal contributions by Nick Hakim and Kalen Remy Walther, upright bass by Benjamin Murphy, textural guitar by Austin Jackson, and saxophone by Jeff Tobias, until she had successfully excavated each cold mystery with proper care and wonder. The completed sound is thick and inviting. Bellowing, breathless vocals, mystical lyrics with the presence of poetry and the intuitive logic of dreams, and promiscuous, sometimes dissonant chord structures swirl together, coalescing into hazy and hypnotic fantasies.

Carried by gentle rhythms, glowing synth pads, jazzy guitar licks, trilling flutes, and astral crescendos, it sounds something like the “energize” effect on “Star Trek” as transposed for a jazz band.” Pitchfork

“Erin Elizabeth Birgy has spent ten years under the guise of the intriguingly ambiguous moniker Mega Bog, which raises almost as many questions as her music. On her fifth record, titled Dolphine, Birgy navigates personal and anthropological trauma on a soundscape that is musically luscious, disruptive, and superbly unsettling.” Loud and Quiet

Brighton-based Americana singer Martyn Lewis AKA M.Butterfly will be joining Mega Bog at The Rose Hill.

With two albums under his belt and support slots with the likes of Phoebe Bridgers, Alasdair Roberts, Nadia Reid and Gaelynn Lea, M. Butterfly represents the best of the melancholy country world. Known locally for his strong lyrics about death, sexuality, mental health and masculinity constructed over subtle country chords, M. Butterfly is an uncompromising voice for modern times.

https://mbutterfly.bandcamp.com/album/m-butterfly-ii