DESCRIPTION:
"Dr. Brown Goes Down / Farker's Fortune" is the seventh song from Talibam! and Sam Kulik's 2012 album "Discover AtlantASS" which was released as digital/cd+comic on Belly Kids record label in London.

In this scene from Talibam! and Sam Kulik's opera "Discover AtlantASS (with accompanying Comic Book)" drummer Franklin (Kevin Shea) jams with bassist Jericho (Sam Kulik) and jazz-fish synth player Stinge (Matt Mottel). Afterwards, Stinge introduces Franklin to the greatest elusive legend in AtlantASS: Barley Farker.

New Yorkers Talibam! and Sam Kulik presented their underwater thriller/opera/fairytale album entitled Discover AtlantASS for a 2-week run at Ontological Theater in NYC summer 2012. The album was released as a 19-track CD with accompanying 30 page comic book by Belly Kids from London in 2012. You can stream/purchase the digital/cd+comic here:

http://bellykids.bandcamp.com/album/discover-atlantass

It marked not only Talibam!'s 25th recorded release since 2005, but also Talibam!'s first foray into opera, and their first record to be released alongside a comic book.

''Discover AtlantASS'' tells the story of a young teen named Franklin who gets abducted to the undersea world of Atlantis by a laid-back jazz fish revolutionary named Stinge. Together, they are ready to combat a disastrous oil spill which has nearly eradicated the vibrant community of poets, musicians, artists and fornicators who inhabit the undersea paradise.

MORE ABOUT THE DISCOVER ATLANTASS THEATER RUN:

Matt Mottel (synthesizer) and Kevin Shea (drums) have been performing and recording together for over 10 years for the sake of music, for the sake of integrating critical reevaluation into the idea of what a band and music can be. Their enthusiasm for sound pitted against sound's sad desecration/humiliation through conspicuous commercial applications has led to the dissolving of their own self-contained borders in order to broaden their musical vocabulary and heighten stylistic shifts into an overarching manifesto on the state of music -- this critical praxis is reinforced and expanded by collaborating with New York-based multi-instumentalist and mastermind Sam Kulik.

Our AtlantASS owes as much to Sun Ra and Frank Zappa as it does to SpongeBob. At the center of the story are Franklin and his magic pillow, brought down to Atlantis to combat a terrible oil spill that is being exploited by corrupt politicians at the expense of Atlantis' poetic and musical free-loving peacenik community. The three of us played all the music and about a dozen characters in the show, throwing in ramshackle costume changes and puppeteering to add to the finely-tuned insanity that is evident right out of the gate. Far from single-minded in his quest to quash the oil spill, Franklin meets a ghost, a spy, some revolutionary jazz fish, and a salacious squid along the way, getting his education in jazz and whatever the undersea equivalent is to the birds and the bees. The record took almost two years to make as characters and scenes were added and the sonic landscape delicately crafted with homemade sound effects.

To our knowledge we are the only performance group to address the implications of the BP Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico in an artistic context. We believe that 'corporate environmental catastrophies' are the world's slow death, and we wanted to hammer home that point in a creative way.

We shot an epic album cover with mermaid models and collaborated with British artist James Clapham to produce a comic book (www.bellykids.co.uk) that details the story told on the record. In June of 2011 and March of 2012 we toured Europe with the traveling version of the show, eliciting responses such as this from joyous audiences:
"...antics are counter-balanced by a thoroughly mind-blowing proficiency, a maze-like collection of tunes drawn from free jazz, hip-hop, psychedelia, and novelty records, seemingly, performed with pinpoint accuracy and frightening ability that literally slackens the jaw, a serious counterpoint to the antics that somehow accentuates the absurdity of the whole bloody enterprise."
- www.drop-d.ie

The full schedule of performances and what guests were performing on which nights was listed at www.discoveratlantass.blogspot.com

http://talibam.bandcamp.com

Check our Talibam! YouTube playlist for more vids:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGXv0p_jhXwC93O2F4IpAt6TQSY-FF1Bf

Kevin Shea's website:
http://www.kevinshea.info

Sam Kulik's website:
http://www.samkulik.com/