FPBJPC

Jubilee is an album of selections from the last five years of multifarious output by the art collective FPBJPC, including Jonathan Gean, Michael Pollard, Ben Schumacher, and Peter Friel. Including 8-hand piano arrangements of Schiller’s “An Die Freude,” helpful techno, free guitar quartets, music from their film The China Chalet Group, and more, Jubilee is an incomplete picture of FPBJPC’s life-long research into ways of hanging out. Side A ends with an anthemic Interpol “cover” performed at the collective’s own Responsibility Festival, which took over southern Ontario’s Wolfe Island for a weekend in the summer of 2019. 

Everything in FPBJPC’s oeuvre requires you to tilt your head to adjust where the glare obscures the picture. Or there’s no glare, but we’re accustomed to thinking there ought to be one. I was in the audience for the 2019 Recital Earth Day Gala concert, and during FPBJPC’s set someone in the audience muttered to me, “perfect music.” At the Interpol concert, I was also in the audience. I didn’t know the words and didn’t feel like crowdsurfing, but I was very happy to be there. This music helps me remember how to learn how to love. Maybe in the last seventy years or so the loveless mistrust of fucks given has become the cruel, background fuck whose givenness is a given. FPBJPC invites us to relieve ourselves of that cruelty and, thereby, invites us back into love. Perfect music.   Derek Baron, Sept. 2020