In the fall of 2012, from the back room of a Brooklyn bar, a muted racket leaked into the street - the first rumblings of the quiet storm of 75 Dollar Bill onto the NY scene. Formed a few months earlier, the duo of Che Chen - issuing slow building, elastic lines of modal guitar, and Rick Brown - hammering complex polyrhythms from a plywood box, has remained, over the last 7 years, a sublime musical metaphor for the melting pot of the city in which it was born - forever expanding and contracting its line-up of collaborators, folding an endlessly diverse number of musical touchstones and voices into their midst, cumulatively as a singular music, entirely their own. Now, following on the heels of 2016's critically heralded Wood/Metal/Plastic Pattern/Rhythm/Rock, 75 Dollar Bill is back with their second album with Thin Wrist and Glitterbeat, I Was Real, stretching out over two glorious LPs.

75 Dollar Bill is one of those rare bands which deftly defies being nailed down at every turn. The moment you think you know what you're hearing, it quickly becomes something else - a likely product of the collision of worlds represented by the two forces steering the ship - Che Chen being a veteran of the NY experimental music scene with collaborations with Tony Conrad, Keiji Haino, Jozef Van Wissem, Robbie Lee, Tetuzi Akiyama, Chie Mukai, Aki Onda, Tashi Dorji, and many others under his belt, while Rick Brown has remained, for roughly 40 years, a driving force within the wilder regions of Rock, having been central to seminal projects like Run On, Fish & Roses, and Timber, not to mention the incredible percussion project, Les Batteries, with Charles Hayward (This Heat / Camberwell Now) and Guigou Chenevier.

Unlike their previous LP, Wood/Metal/Plastic Pattern/Rhythm/Rock, comprised of duo recordings, I Was Real encountered them in the expanded form which has defined a great many of their local shows, pulling from an incredible cast of characters from the NY scene - Sue Garner, Cheryl Kingan, Andrew Lafkas, Karen Waltuch, Jim Pugliese, Barry Weisblat, Steve Maing, and Carey Balch, taking various configurations. The sound is bigger, and with the entry of each highly individual voice, pushes toward ecstatic heights - the cycling lines of quarter tone guitar and rhythms doubled and tripled by the rich tones of bass, saxophone, viola, and other interventions, culminating as a music entirely born within the spirit of experimental music, while sounding like how that thing is known. A music which challenges the mind, and forces you to dance.

The absolutely astounding culmination of a four year recording process, I Was Real is about to become the unchallenged soundtrack of our summer. It's impossible to get off of the turntable once the needle drops.