ABOUT THIS ITEM

Brian has been playing music since the age of 6. He was born in New York, and grew up paying close attention to his father's record collection in New Jersey. Around the age of 17, Brian started drifting away from home due to family problems. He was befriended by psychedelic, ex-Mormon gypsies who opened him up to a world of spiritual enlightenment and took him on journeys throughout North America. At this time, Brian began studying philosophies on duality while recording 4-track, lo-fi covers of Charles Manson and John Lennon songs. After travelling around America and Canada for several months in the summer of 2006 in support of his 2005 debut "The Sore Score", Brian began writing what is now his second solo release, "Concrete Myths". An old friend John Zambricki, who was at the time making a living doing session work as a fiddle, violin, viola, and cello player in Nashville, TN, took a Greyhound bus up to the small studio in Freehold, New Jersey where Brian was recording. They met in a small cafe before the session and rehearsed everything one time. two more sessions took place to capture other instruments played by Brian, old-time friends, and long lost lovers. During the time of the recording, Brian would often find himself sleeping in the studio, sleeping in ex-girlfriend's arms, and even sleeping in ATM booths in bank branches to keep warm and dry. A few days into the mixing, Brian received a phone call from an acquaintance in New York saying that a close friend of his had passed away. Unfortunately, he couldn't even make it to the funeral due to a lack of money in his pocket. Heartbroken, weak, and tired, Brian retreated to the small ghost-town of Asbury Park, NJ. He put the record on hold, not knowing if he was ever going to finish it or ever release it and decided to press a four song 7" independently on his own Yes & No Recordings label. That followed by the creation of band he started called Werewolves and resumed DJ'ing in NYC. He returned to New York with his bandmates and completed the double 7" Werewolves "ES" EP in three days. While moving from Manhattan back to Brooklyn, Brian found a copy of "Concrete Myths" in one of his moving boxes. He returned to Blue Room Studios in New Jersey to finish the mixing of a record that he never thought or hoped would see the light of day. After the final mix was complete, friends of friends who managed to find bootleg copies of the finished full-length began calling it the post-expressionist soundtrack to Arthur Rimbaud's literary masterpiece, 'A Season In Hell'. An old friend, Shawn Butler (BNS Sessions), convinced Brian to finally get the record mastered and pressed. Brian Amsterdam's "Concrete Myths" paints a picturesque vision that can perhaps be taken from a scene from Easy Rider or even Paris, Texas. Infusing elements of Van Zandt and Leadbelly transcend the auditory pleasures with a resounding underlying production of percussion and engineering that are reminiscent of early 70s Spector.