Bellows

Thrilled to announce that Bellows’ sixth album, the mammoth double-LP “Que Bello!” is coming out on June 12th on @bloodyknucklesnyc ✨ It’s a giant record and @nadurath had the idea of releasing it in “chunks” instead of the traditional singles rollout. You can hear the first chunk now, “QB!” c. 1: green, 4 songs that represent the center of the album. I’m so excited to share this music with you over the next few months - I have a lot to say about the record’s meaning that I’ll share over time, a lot of it is about the abjection of persona-first art-as-commerce, the disposability one feels as an artist forced to sell a persona to stay afloat. It’s also about memory and the indelible, imagining through myth and history a world where beauty is absolute rather than conditional and sold out for short term gain. You can also watch a new music video for “Fung Wah Bus” I made with my friend Ajai Vishwanath 🚌 Album release show at @night_club_101 on 6/30 with goated songwriters @d.a.crimson and @parksdeptband 🚎 Pre-order and video in my bio 🚐 📷: @toldslant_felix Album cover photo taken in Seville by @samantraa with artwork, collage and lettering by me and assembly by @richardginorg ☀️

Bellows is doing a big album release tour this summer to celebrate “Que Bello!” We’re gonna have a gigantic 6-piece lineup for this, it will be huge ~ playing with some of my favorite musicians & people of all time, you should come cuz it’s often years between our tours these days ✨ 6/25 - NYC at Bowery Ballroom (sold out!) ⭐️ 6/30 - NYC at Night Club 101 (album release show) 7/1 - Boston at O’Briens ☀️ 7/2 - Portland, ME at Apohadion ☀️ 7/3 - Exeter, NH at Word Barn ☀️ 7/5 - Washington, DC at Black Cat Red Room 7/6 - Durham, NC at The Pinhook 7/7 - Asheville, NC at Static Age 🌙 7/8 - Nashville, TN at Strange Handle 🌙 7/9 - Chicago, IL at Sleeping Village 🌙 7/10 - Dayton, OH - Tooth Lodge 🌙 7/11 - Rochester, NY at Bookeater 🌙 ⭐️ w/ @thehoteliergram ☀️ w/ @hello_shark_official 🌙 w/ @terrorpigeon

“Bureaucratic Tower” - this is the gigantic climax track on the new Bellows album, my futuristic shriek at the decaying of the world 🌍 @samantraa and I shot this during the huge blizzard earlier this year, running through the woods blaring a war horn, portending doom. I was having fun with a fisheye lens too, shot this driving around getting pumped to the energy of the song as I drove and playing with the lens distortions. I basically made this video myself using iPhone footage I shot as I traveled around the world over the last 4 years, there’s images of Indonesia, Turkey, Kosovo, England, Malaysia and Spain just to name a few. The song is about the feeling of living through a degraded era, the feeling of a heavy loss of integrity in the expectation of selling yourself every moment, resulting in the lurking feeling that you’re in the midst of an elaborate fake of your life, a bureaucratic tower, extravagantly false as a clown car 🤡 People who played on the song: Vocals, guitar, piano & samples: @bellows4l Bass, electric guitar & samples: @sharplessmusic Drums: @_lamniformes_ Harmony vocals: @emilyreo Piano & bowed upright bass: @frank__meadows Brass: @jakebjazz

4 brand new songs from Bellows’ new double album “Que Bello!” are out now, a chunk known as “QB!” c. 2: black this chunk is the climax of the album, the final sweep toward the sordid ending. 3 of these songs are Bellows at his most mindful and demure, and one is Bellows in a mindset of total doom; wrath & ruin 1. “Ease into Myself Again” 2. “Give You All My Love” 3. “Bureaucratic Tower” 4. “Midnight’s Passing” There’s also a new video for “Bureaucratic Tower” that Sam and I shot during the blizzard that hit New York this past winter, racing through the snow, blaring a war horn, portending doom 📯 Felix took this very dramatic photo of me that I love 📷: @toldslant_felix

Here’s the video for “Learning How” I made with my oldest friend Eva Ravenal. We placed me in a museum exhibit of myself, huge behemoth versions of me projected on walls, glitching out at different rates - “the voices through the wall” 🔵 The song is about becoming numb to suffering, the different ways we desensitize ourselves to the violence around us, just behind the wall — how difficult it can be to access an original emotion after so long ignoring or looking past the many faces of pain that are right in front of us constantly, “how deep I would keep within me the first time, learning how to cry” This is a song I’ve been cooking for a while that I’ve written many versions of over the years, but I’m really proud of the arrangement Jack and I came up with, the pitched-down clarinets like a shofar blowing in a temple 🛕

Touring with @thehoteliergram in 2016 was one of my favorite tours of the blur that was my life when I was touring constantly through the 2010s. I remembering listening to Two Deliverances every night and getting so pumped at the “what was I supposed to do? What was I supposed to do?” Truly a peak moment in the annals of the rock song Extremely psyched to play with them again this June ⭐️

We got engaged to be wed 💍

July 1st Bellows (NYC) returns to O'Brien's with support from Hello Shark & People Person Puzzle Tree. O'Brien's Allston Presales in bio. 18+

Thanks to everybody who listened to the new songs last week ❤️ We made extremely limited variants of the vinyl, only 50 each of “Venetian Glass” and “Sevilla Sky”— the Sky ones are already half gone so you should grab one if you want it 🎐 those special editions come with a poster and sticker too for the real Bellows admirers Vinyl also comes in the classic licorice pizza, the black wax you know and love Also @bloodyknucklesnyc made these limited CDs with Venetian glass artwork and a gorgeous obi strip 🧢 And last but not least the cassettes feature alternate artwork in O-Cards, a drawing I made of the Aston Martin from James Bond with a blurry demon at the wheel, “honey disconnect the phone!” - the blurry Bond has left a trail of bleeding bodies on his path, or maybe the art will mean something different to you 🚘 only 100 cassettes were made so you know what to do

JUST ANNOUNCED [7.09] • Bellows is the Brooklyn-based bedroom recording project of songwriter and producer Oliver Kalb. On July 9, he co-headlines a show at Sleeping Village with Chicago's own Cusp. Fellow local Girl K and Nashville's Terror Pigeon support. • Tix on DICE!!

Here’s the music video for “Fung Wah Bus” - the centerpiece track on the new Bellows album 🚎 My friend Ajai Vishwanath shot this on camcorder around Chinatown and in our rehearsal space in Gowanus, we were trying to create a sense of blurry doppelgängers, me running around this grainy version of Manhattan and getting lost in the crowd: “if there is one there’s a hundred more” The Fung Wah Bus was a legendarily broken down bus line that used to run from NYC to Boston when I was a teenager. It cost only a dollar, was always catching on fire and getting in really gnarly accidents, and became emblematic for me of a past version of New York that lately feels erased from the cultural memory, when things were a little less clean and put together and there was more of a sense of precariousness and mystery about everything. The bus became a blurry symbol of a Manhattan that exists in my memory, or maybe never existed at all. I wrote the song as a kind of schoolyard chant, writing a bit teasingly about the feeling of disposability one feels as a working artist, feeling easily replaceable: “if there is one, there’s a hundred thousand more Dan Electro guitars”. I’ll say the bridge of this song is one of my proudest moments as a songwriter, a climb to the top of the mountain. It was fun shooting this at King Killer with Ajai violently shaking our DV camcorder to get the Wong Kar Wai blur, orbiting around us as we illicitly play the song in the vestibule area of the space (people kept walking in) Players on the song are: Harmonies: @emilyreo Drums: @_lamniformes_ Piano & bowed upright: @frank__meadows Bass, electric guitar & vocals in the bridge: @sharplessmusic And me doing everything else 🤙 You can watch the full vid in my bio 🚐

🚌 🚎 🚌 tomorrow 🚎 🚌 🚎 📷: @richardginorg