Formed in Brooklyn, New York, Piñataland is the creation of David Wechsler and Doug Stone, performers/songwriters who set out to form a new band centered around their fascination for the stories and sounds of the Weird Old World.
Over the past few years, the 5-piece Piñataland have become experts at conjuring the strangeness of history to life with violin, tuba, accordion, guitar and drums. Far from being "old-timey" purists, the band's strikingly original music resembles some never-existed pre-WWII rock, lurching from the epic and grandiose to the haunting.
Piñataland draws inspiration from the all-but-forgotten events of the past 200 years, yanking dim but startling memories directly into the audience's waiting ears. The menacing "Ota Benga's Name" summons the tragic ghost of the African pygmy who found himself living in the monkey house of the Bronx Zoo in 1904. "Flying Down to Moscow" is a Cold-War, Kremlin-Country tribute to Mathias Rust, the West German teenager who landed his small plane in Red Square in 1987. The epic "Sleepwalker" tells the story of the building of the transcontinental railroad, as seen through the closed eyes of a man sleepwalking across the great plains of the 1860's. These and other shadowy events from our collective unconcious are featured on their new album, Songs for the Forgotten Future.
In addition to appearing at numerous venues on the East Coast, Piñataland has been featured on NPR's All Songs Considered, performed at the Thomas Edison Historic Site (where they demonstrated wax cylinder recording), the American Museum of Natural History's Margaret Mead Film Festival, and the historic Atlantic Avenue Subway Tunnel. They have also played live on New Jersey's famed WFMU, and mounted their own multi-media show in 2001 at the HERE Arts Center in NYC. |
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