The closest thing to explaining what ART/CRiME is or isn't is probably best told as the genesis of ART/CRiME, which won't really answer the question of what ART/CRiME is or isn't at all. It might give you a bit of a notion....In 2005 I was hanging out with King Vitamin in Maryland while they were cutting some demos-- some really psychedelic, out there kind of noise -- and thinking how great it would be if people could hear this, if they could put it in their CD player or blast it from their stereo or their computer or iPod or whatever, but if more than the clubs who got this and whomever was around to get free copies, if anyone could decide to give it a try and listen to this great music....that was the genesis for a long term goal....but back then, it was only just a few people around who had access to this music, which wasn't a bad thing at all, as the crew was very tight, then. Besides the guys in King Vitamin then at the time-- Dan Haberman singing, Alex Babel on guitar, and Sam Haberman on guitars and drums-- there was myself, filling in here or there at a show on bass with the guys, Sam Cimino-- the Magical Fire Lady, who can make hats & scarves & crafts & neat shit & beautiful paintings-- and Joshua Maxwell, one half of the Maxwell Boys Productions crew, who writes and directs and acts in delightfully strange films (I'll never forget the evening we watched a rough-cut of his End All Beginnings before taking in Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain-- my mind was completely blown).....so we were just a bunch of kids who were into weird music and weird film and weird art and making it but not knowing how to really get it out there. And it was frustrating. Kv had become one of my favourite bands very quickly, especially the chunes they were recording-- in a suburban basement, super DIY on digital tech, lo-fi agression & occasional quick softness, lyrics a smattering of imagistic existential angst and fevered panic and charged full of the very thing it was forgetting....

Flash forward now, to 2008, just last year. There was a great big ruckus goin' on at the unofficial ART/CRiME playhouse in Boston. My mind was blown that the playhouse hosted the acts it did, an eclectic smattering of Boston's underground; Sonny Jim (originally assigned Jimmy Blues and then later The Good Reverend), somehow a born and bred Masshole who was whiter than anything I ever saw yet was the most authentic bluesman and Delta-slide player I've come across in this doomed century...Paper Mache Lighthouse, an interesting fellow, that Mr. Dunn is, he makes you really think, and I mean that as a compliment and not with an intellectualist bent-- hell of a songwriter he is....Cars on Mars, who are no longer underground and G-d bless 'em for it and their beautiful music.....anyway, there were bands on in a weird, curated fashion at the Playhouse. The Playhouse also served as homebase for The Rock & Roll Church of Love, which Max Garvey and I founded as this band BearCat until we took a trip down to Baltimore to play a show with King Vitamin at the Nerve Center...To repay them, we hosted them at the Playhouse, one night (two nights actually) where the bill was the Lighthouse, the Church, Cars on Mars and King Vitamin. And that was a really cool bill. One of the guys in the general Kv entourage was some cat from Rhode Island, I think, and he remarked that we were running a really cool scene. And that kind of stuck with me. That summer, the Church got around to doing some recording, and Kv was doing some more recording, and Paper Mache Lighthouse is always recording, got my mind to spinning about an idea I'd had in 2005, which was to just do it all ourselves. Since that point, though, it was just a dream kind of thing until I saw what Anton Newcombe was doing with The Committee to Keep Music Evil/A Records, when all the tracks from all the bands were free downloadable .oggs. I thought that was kind of a cop out though- why not do it as an mp3? The consumer can convert it anyway if they want. So, ART/CRiME (the name supplied by Sam Haberman) became an idea for something like what this place is: a way for all the artists we know to let pretty much anybody who's interested experience their art....and that, I think, is almost far too revealing....of course the synchronicities and curling lotus like expressions of time throughout the whole thing-- CB and Daniel James and Myles writing; Beard & Hello Airplane & Cars & Killing Young Mothers & a true collective & -Hey Nich Dukes, what's the name of yer band again? The Rockin' Jesus Somethins? & all kinds of other dovetailing events blasting back & forth thru true 4-dimensional space which isn't even nearly all the space there is 'cause....& Emily who takes the pictures & Mike who draws & Magical Fire Lady & the gangs all here, merry merry hey...few more involved, too of course, Pat & all....but far too much has been said...