Astral Projections Presents: Bonnie Prince Billy (with special guests Footings and Empath)

Tickets on sale now.

Astral Projections and Pentangle Arts presents Bonnie Prince Billy, with special guests Footings and Empath.

Join us for a unique collaboration featuring talented musicians, wonderful food, beverages and a special summer vibe. The event begins with an afternoon outdoor Beer Garden with DJ, featuring beverages from Upper Pass and food by GameBird.

The event continues inside with live music from Footprints and Empath and the main event, Bonnie Prince Billy.

It seems intentional that despite a 30 year recording career with 25 plus albums, Will Oldham’s music defies genre classification. Freak folk, country, Appalachian post-punk. The uncanny troubadour, playing under the moniker Bonnie “Prince” Billy will perform an intimate, one night only show at the Woodstock Town Hall Theatre on Saturday, August 13.

Supported by Footings (Peterborough, NH) and Empath (Philadelphia, PA), doors open at 6:00 pm. In addition, we will have an outdoor beer garden behind the theater featuring an event collaboration beer from Upper Pass (South Royalton, VT), food pop-up from GameBird (Ludlow, VT) and DJ Middle Management supplying vinyl atmosphere for good times.

About Bonnie Price Billy:

Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy has been Will Oldham’s singing dummy since 1998. Oldham lives in Louisville, KY with wife and daughter. As our collective subconscious understanding of what songs are has shifted, so has their work. In late ’19/early ’20 I Made a Place came out, a new record of original songs. Over the course of the horrific 2020 Bill Callahan and Bonny Billy released, ‘virtually’, Blind Date Party, ultimately 20 songs with accompanying visualizations, in an effort to bridge newly revealed distances in space, time and emotion. Matt Sweeney & Bonny Billy’s SUPERWOLVES came out in 2021; this was a group of rock poems. In 2022 there’s been the live singalong cycle Old Hard and Marvelous and the cassette-only hard-dreamcycle release High and High and MIghty, on Ha Ha Institute.

About Footings:

Footings is the long-running/rocking outgrowth of Peterborough NH’s great ruralist duo, Redwing Blackbird. Initially formed as a trio in 2012 by Eric Gagne on guitar and vocals, Footings’ sound embraces a sort of inner light derived from folk music, but surrounds it with a variety of rockist tropes. This rock action can take many forms, especially on this new album, which features their most expanded/expansive line-up yet.

Original trio member Elisabeth Fuchsia (frequent Pile collaborator) is on viola and long-time collusionist Candace Clement provides guitar, synth and vocals. Jordan Holtz (from Rick Rude) supplies vocals. Ben Rogers (Eric’s bandmate from Death to Tyrants) adds drums where needed. Will Killingsworth (Ampere/Bucket Full of Teeth) adds pedals and tambourine as required. The latter pair were also responsible for engineering the album, but their musical additions are sonically notable.

Gagne’s songs and deep vocals, often the core of the band’s operation, combine the literary qualities of a heavy reader with the observational data of a poet. In this, Footings might occasionally be mistaken for one of Will Oldham’s multifarious projects. But the band has a distinct way of scrambling their eggs, and that was never clearer than it is here. Full songs are interspersed with fragmentary shards in a way that reminds me of how Michael Hurley faded out “Rat Face” after its intro, on Hi Fi Snock Uptown. I mean, “Sleeping” sounds tantalizingly close to a Neil Young penned out-take from Deja Vu for the 35 seconds it runs. But that’s all there is!

This outré editing process works quite well. By allowing themselves to create slivers of textural similarity to Sonic Youth (“Ordinary Night”), Crazy Horse (“Sleeping”), and even Heldon (“Wouldn’t It Be Something”), Footins display wide possibilities while maintaining their primary focus on creating a kind of avant garde American roots music with the brash complexity of Yo La Tengo and the stately depth of Wilco.

Annihilation is the best Footings record to hit the planet yet. And that is saying something.”

– Byron Coley

About Empath:

Ask the members of Empath how things have changed since the release of their critically-acclaimed 2019 album, Active Listening: Night on Earth, and they’ll downplay it.

“We bought a wheelchair bus to tour in from the sketchiest dealership in South Jersey,” drummer Garrett Koloski says. “And we have band credit cards now—did you know you can get a cash advance on a credit card? Pretty cool.”

“I think we own the title now… but there have been a few complications,” guitarist/vocalist Catherine Elicson interrupts, her skepticism palpable.

“I’ve had to quit my grocery job many times to tour, but they just keep hiring me back,” synth player/engineer Randall Coon offers.

“Basically, this is a small business,” keyboardist Jem Shanahan quips. “I have a credit score now, because of Empath.”

It’s in the band’s nature to turn every question you throw at them into a joke, but the four friends from Philly have reached a point where they’ll begrudgingly admit that this project is a nascent career, one that they can’t help but fling themselves at with total abandon. “Our mindset is: we have nothing else but this band, so we’d better put all our eggs in this basket and hopefully take over the world,” Elicson says, “Or crash and burn.”

On February 11, 2021, Empath will release their sophomore full-length, Visitor, via Fat Possum, which marks a seismic shift for the scrappy quartet who came up playing shows on Northeastern DIY circuits and are now staring down a tour with Modest Mouse in the biggest rooms any of them have ever performed in. While the album holds steadfast to the careening, joyous noise Empath staked their name on, Visitor was produced by Jake Portrait, making it the first release the band has recorded with a producer in a formal studio. “Jake has the technical expertise to make anything sound like anything,” Elicson says.

Inspired by the disquieting scores of Nosferatu (1922) and The Wicker Man (1973) alongside David Bowie’s Low and forever favorites Fleetwood Mac, Empath sought to one-up the range of sounds heard on their previous album. During what he calls West Philly Christmas (the week undergrads at UPenn move out and leave piles of high-quality garbage out on the street) Coon recovered a suitcase organ with a sound bank from a Jamiroquai record preset on it, which he later played on the album, in addition to running samples on Ableton and acquiring a brand new synth; Shanahan, who plays a ‘90s children’s keyboard, had Portrait filter it in such a way that it sounded “less childlike”; Elicson’s vocals, buried deep in the mix on Active Listening: Night on Earth, take center stage; and Koloski’s drums are as capacious as they might be in a live set.

“Our approach to songwriting, and what we constantly try to improve upon, is finding the meeting ground between all of our distinct points of view and ideas we are trying to achieve sonically and conceptually,” Elicson says. “We never want to be tied down to one type of song or sound, and we love all kinds of improvisational music. We try to fit everything we love into each song, and hopefully produce something new and exciting through that process of synthesis.”