Monsters of Accordion - Corn Mo, Jason Webley, Mark Growden, Duckmandu, Geoff Berner

Doors at 8pm
12 Galaxies
2565 Mission Street
San Francisco, CA 94110

Event Information:
415-970-9777

- Corn Mo

Corn Mo uses this quirky soundscape to compose mini-anthems, heroic passages and chaotic polkas. If his spiritual father is Freddie Mercury, then his spiritual uncle is Tiny Tim.

- Jason Webley

Seattle’s Jason Webley is a consummate performer. He appears like a back alley prophet in layers of baggy clothes, a trench coat and an old porkpie hat; he leaps onto stages, window ledges and bartops, feverishly pumping the bellows of his accordion and stomping out the beat while roaring and whispering in his passionate, gravelly baritone. His music - a mix of gypsy, folk and punk - traverses age and social background, drawing grandparents, children, punks, drunks, and lovers into the fold. He likes to sing about death, carousing, and vegetables.

- Mark Growden

Mark Growden is the kind of songwriter who only comes around once in an age. Endlessly, deliriously creative, Growden has recorded and released two full-lengths (Inside Beneath Behind and Downstairs Karaoke), written and performed a myriad of theater pieces, scored music for videos and films, and contributed to Bob Weir's Sun Ra tribute album. His work has earned him a deluge of praise throughout his career, including the Isadora Duncan Award for Best Original Music for a New Dance Piece and two Best Song awards from the Northern California Songwriter's Association. Hailed as "a contender for Beck's throne" by Alternative Press magazine, the restless Growden is one of those musicians who will play anything that gets in his way -- from pawnshop hallmarks such as the accordion, banjo, and saxophone, to a host of freakish home inventions and non-instruments like PVC pipes and scissors. His inventive, imaginative lyrics are as wide ranging as his instrument choices, evoking Tom Waits' ragged theatricality, but on a more charming and personal scale. Growden's stories -- about Ted Nugent, a shuttered factory that made wooden crates in an era of cardboard, and feeling like a piece of meat at a vegan potluck -- are at once contemporary and timeless, funny and heartbreaking, surreal and lucid. It sounds like an impossible set of contradictions, but Growden is born to achieve the inconceivable; for a man with his talents, the impossible is just a starting point.

- Duckmandu

Duckmandu (aka Aaron Seeman), accordionist, pianist, and old school punk, does an impressive Jello Biafra imitation, which he will treat you to tonight, as well as familiar songs of other genres that have never occurred to you to be performed on accordion.

- Geoff Berner

It would be tempting to paint Berner as a kind of klezmer rebel, but he maintains that he is working firmly in the true tradition. “When we went to Romania, we found musicians who are masterful, but can also play so loud and passionately that pitch and meter don’t matter. And the words in the songs are full of drinking, politics and sex. That’s my kind of tradition.