Sent to earth in Early March of 2003 to spread the message of Beardo and bring lunch to all sentient beings on the planet via psychedelic improvisation and experimentation. Reportedly hailing from the Planet Lunch, Lunch With Beardo make an unholy racket of deeply spaced-out, euphorically dissonant, and apocalyptically unsettling noises for the postmodern age. This buffet of sounds, in all its alchemical glory, is strewn across the table for easy digestion on their debut full length Surrealistic Picnic.
Lunch With Beardos origins trace back to 2003 when several veterans of various upstate New York punk and hardcore bands (The Sex Machines, Deprivation, Murdershift) and various other collaborators formed a loose-knit collective to share their love of free-jazz, post-rock, noise, and various other experimental and fringe genres with the world. Easily distinguishing themselves from the regions somewhat provincial music scene, Lunch With Beardo found themselves equally captivating and confusing new audiences. Their wild, improvisational mixtures of futuristic space-age ambience, pop culture sound collages, outlandish stage antics, and punishing, feedback-laced wall-of-sound theatrics were, to some, refreshing souffl?s flown in from outer space to save the fast food nation from the drabness of its schlock and awe. Lunch With Beardo not only performed countless shows in the Hudson Valley, but also embarked on a tour with FDH Records labelmates Humans Are the Worst Invention in Summer 2005 that took them up and down eastern seaboard. Though the band distributed a high quantity of bootleg quality live performances to interested parties on cassette and CD-R (mostly for free) through the DIY label FDH Records, Lunch With Beardo had not recorded a real album until Winter 2005/2006. It was then that band members Jeff Bumiller, Jesse Heffler, Eric The Ill, Jon Wazoo, and Timh Gabriele began the three month long process of laying down tracks for what would eventually become Surrealistic Picnic (the title is a nod to Jefferson Airplanes Surrealistic Pillow album, which helped usher in the first psychedelic era). Produced by Eric The Ill and mastered by Colin Marston (Infidel?/Castro!, Dysrhythmia), Surrealistic Picnic is the ultimate, awesome amalgamation of the bands past sonic experiments, as well as a concise summary of their vision for the future of what they term Spaceadelic music. Divided into three official communications from the Planet Lunch, the album begins with Innocence to Wisdom, a melancholic hymn whose opening melody foreshadows the dark monolith of sound to come. The riff sets an eerie tone redolent of invading aircraft slowly casting shadows across the bucolic landscape of Middle America like some 1950s sci-fi film. Soon, somber howls, dubbed-out guitars, aching trumpets, creepy tape loops, primal drumming, wailing drones, and other mysterious, unidentified freeform objects begin to emerge from the ether to form a cosmic powerhouse unrivaled by many of their psychedelic peers.
Lunch With Beardo have served their galactic ear candy at an array of biker bars, art galleries, nightclubs, collective spaces, basements, and college campuses throughout the past few years in support of acts like Wolf Eyes, Prurient, Borbetomagus, Crank Sturgeon, Kites, Tides, Growing, Dan Deacon, Guilty Connector, and Carlos Gioffani. The ebb and flow of a Lunch With Beardo performance can fluctuate between a spiritual and whimsical glissando and an orgiastic bedlam of frenzied freakouts complete with violent tantrums of anarchic food-tossing, instrument-wailing, and uncontrolled satanic chanting about peanut butter soldiers, the tyranny of shaving, or the dissolution of western society. Lunch With Beardo is not only nourishment for the ears, but food for the whole body. Together, the band assembles an unrelenting physical force that bleeds out of ones earphones and demands attention. It is safe to say Lunch With Beardo have arrived, and so the trip begins.