Years of underground sonic experiments on a cassette tape of unknown origins culminate in this extraordinary staging of encoded pop music and live video transmissions.

The Dr. Dog Pop Detachment and The Pig Iron Psychedelic Signals Auxiliary compose a performance-experiment that will tune in to rare frequencies and decode transmissions from the Psychedelic Swamp. Since 2002, the Dr. Dog Pop Detachment have received puzzling messages from a man named Phrases. In the face of government interference, scientists and cryptographers will gather at a former railway junction turned music venue, vowing “to agitate the cosmic order and commune in real time with the sights and sounds of another dimension.”

Bring your old cassette tapes—ones you can say goodbye to, permanently—to get them shucked and decoded. Mix tapes from forgotten lovers, old light country cassettes, or blank tapes with a tangle in them—all are welcome. SWAMP IS ON seeks a critical mass of combined magnetism to unlock the secrets of the Swamp.

Dimensional borders will be restored following this experiment, and Dr. Dog will play a full concert of favorites.

Doors at 7:15
Experiment and Transmission at 8:00
Full Concert by Dr. Dog to Follow
$30 / All Ages

About Dr. Dog

The Philadelphia-based Dr. Dog are part of a long tradition of D.I.Y. pop oddballs who blend unapologetic ’60s pop worship with lo-fi recording techniques and an apparent disregard for current trends. Their first recordings, The Psychedelic Swamp (2001) and Toothbrush (2003) received a low-key, self-distributed release. 2005’s Easy Beat was picked up for distribution by the indie label National Parking. Following its release, the band toured again with My Morning Jacket and M. Ward and performed several well-received sets during the 2006 South by Southwest festival in Austin. The stopgap EP Takers and Leavers was released in September 2006 in advance of We All Belong, which arrived in early 2007. In the summer of that same year, the group released Fate, the band’s most polished production to date and their highest charting album, peaking at number 86 on the Billboard 200 and earning positive reviews from outlets like Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly. After touring in support of the album, the group signed with the ANTI- record label and released 2010’s Shame, Shame, a modern album that featured more guitars than the band’s earlier work. Following the release of Be The Void in 2012, the band set to work building their own studio, a process that found the band refreshed enough to release another album, B-Room, in 2013. In early 2015, the group released their first live album, Live at a Flamingo Hotel.

About Pig Iron

Founded in 1995, Pig Iron Theatre Company is dedicated to the creation of new and exuberant performance works that defy easy categorization. To date the company has premiered 30 original works, garnering praise from audiences, peers, and critics. The New York Times hailed Pig Iron as “one of the few groups successfully taking theatre in new directions.”

Rather than beginning work from a script, Pig Iron begins with an idea and with bodies moving in space, allowing the ensemble to forge the piece through focused improvisation and d
iscussion. This unique creation process has yielded an extraordinary array of performance pieces ranging from minimalist to maximalist, from dance-theatre to cabaret. Pig Iron’s original creations have received two OBIE Awards, two Total Theatre Awards from the Edinburgh Fringe, eight Barrymore Awards for Excellence in Theatre (and 40 nominations) and a listing as one of the top 10 productions of the year in the New York Times. Pig Iron’s work has been developed in residencies at New York’s Public Theatre, Toni Morrison’s Atelier program at Princeton University, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Playmakers Rep, and La Jolla Playhouse among others. Pig Iron’s productions have been presented at Dance Theatre Workshop and Abrons Arts Center (NYC), Z Space (San Francisco), Woolly Mammoth (DC), Festival Konfrontacje Teatralne (Lublin, Poland), Teatr Rozmaitosci (Warsaw, Poland), Camden People’s Theatre (London), October Arts Festival (Ennis, Ireland), Strictly Mundial Festival (Salvador, Brazil), the Under the Radar Festival (NYC), as well as six tours to Edinburgh Fringe Festival. In 2015, Pig Iron partnered with the University of the Arts to begin offering an MFA in Devised Performance. The partnership will continue to offer a two- year Certificate in Devised Performance at the Pig Iron School for Advanced Performance Training.

Press

“[SWAMP IS ON] is going to be a challenging project, mostly because we’ve built it up in our own minds so much. It’s tense now that we’re on the verge of actually doing it. It was always something we were talking about doing ‘someday,’ but now ‘someday’ is here.” –Dr. Dog keyboardist Zach Miller Read more here

“MG- Have you ever preformed the album in its entirety?

TL- No, but it’s something we talked about a bunch. Scott and I did that, with our old guitar player, Doug [O’Donnell]. So it’s just the three of us. I don’t think any of those songs any of the other guys have played. And we’ve probably only played them when we recorded them. So, no, but it’s something we’ve thought about a lot actually. There’s a really cool theatre group in Philly called “pig-iron” which we’re friends with. I sort of had a fantasy, if we could get it together and make it more understandable and maybe have those guys work on a dialogue we could actually perform it as a musical.” Read more here

“We’ve always been fascinated with the special performance state that happens when someone plays a musical instrument onstage,” said Pig Iron Co-Artistic Director Dan Rothenberg. “It’s part of what people come to see at a music event, and at a theater event it’s either made invisible or kept in check by the limited vocabulary of ‘musical theater.’ We’re pretty excited to work with a bona fide rock outfit and see what we can create that is part-theater, part-concert, part-something-we-don’t-know.” Read more here

“The surreal deal includes a bunch of dark and buggy new tunes from Dr. Dog, visually translated by Pig Iron performers and designers with eccentric live video feeds.” Read more here

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