Nehemiah St-Danger

The Slow and Painful Birth of Nehemiah St-Danger

– an autobiographical meta-operetta about Post-9/11 America, Antediluvian Mysteries and Self-Aggrandizing Myth…

Out now on our website; in stores 9/25

The Slow and Painful Birth of Nehemiah St-Danger has been a long time coming. Originally recorded in Oakland circa 2005, and further supplemented in 2008, the tracks were then subjected to trials and tribulations that included three hard drive failures, digital sound file reconstruction, and re-recording. After languishing in relative obscurity for a number of years, these basement tapes have been unearthed yet again, and Post-Consumer Records is pleased to give them the release they deserve.

Nehemiah St-Danger began his expansive musical trajectory at the tender age of seventeen, playing with none other than C.W. Vrtacek (Biota, Forever Einstein), before moving to Oakland. While squatting at Mills College he discovered Morton Subotnick’s Buchla synth and began using the facilities at the San Francisco Tape Music Center covertly (another secret recording was being made there at the same time – it was Joanna Newsome’s The Milk-Eyed Mender). While there he picked the brains of avant luminaries such as Cecil Taylor, Fred Frith and Pauline Oliveros, passing for an anonymous graduate student. Since then, he’s played with The Fits, Leyna Noel (Psychic Reality, Pocahaunted), Chris Stroffolino (Silver Jews) and Greg Ashley (The Gris Gris).  He currently plays in Malaikat Dan Singa with Old Time Relijun’s Arrington De Dionyso.

At some point during these myriad projects Nehemiah sought a reprieve from the spotlight and retreated to his bedroom. Toiling away in poverty and obscurity, he developed a stratagem, and so came The Slow and Painful Birth of Nehemiah St-Danger. Nehemiah composed and recorded the album using 4-track cassette, open-source software, and ‘artificially-sentient’ computer programs, mining elements from disparate sources as did The Velvet Underground with the noisier aspects of R’n’B, and the avant-garde.  That process, when paired with underlying themes of spirituality and the artist’s pursuit/realization of his own power and identity, serves to magnify this hypnagogic bedroom operetta, to carry it beyond the merely local into the undeniably universal.

Full of blind alleys, haunted hallways, and open corridors, The Slow and Painful Birth of Nehemiah St-Danger is ultimately a vision of the future circumscribed by an architect with an acute knowledge of the past. In what was ultimately a journey of self-discovery, St-Danger has harnessed the energy of this precarious world we inhabit and used it for all our benefit – he may well be the harbinger of a new American Folk Music.

Program A (The Travails of Men in Repose)

1. Nehemiah St-Danger Lost and Alone in Concussion Musics
2. Invocation of the Old “Come On Brother, Now”
3. Nehemiah St-Danger Meets Venus of the Tumbling Towers
4. Nehemiah St-Danger Lost and Alone in the Tiger Ate My Head Blues
5. Nehemiah St-Danger Lost and Alone in the Desert on Christmas Morning
6. Nehemiah St-Danger Sings “The Ezra Dada Tea Town Rag”
7. Nehemiah St-Danger Lost and Alone in the Song of Impermanence

Program B (Conspiracy Theory Rock)

8. Let’s Take Some Drugs to the Park
9. Nehemiah St-Danger Lost and Alone in a Series of Construction Paper Chains
10. Nehemiah’s Theme
11. Nehemiah St-Danger Lost and Alone in the Apotheosis of Love
12. Blood Mysteriously Manifests Itself in the Yolk
13. Reprise Invocation of the Old “Come On Brother, Now”
14. Nehemiah St-Danger Sings Selections from the Agnostic Gospels Hymnal
15. Overture to the Rotting Rainbows of Babylon