The Kentucky Derby is quickly approaching, with the official kickoff to the Kentucky Derby Festival scheduled to take place with Thunder Over Louisville on Saturday, April 13th! We're beyond excited to announce that sonaBLAST! Records' artist James Lindsey was tapped to provide the music for this year's official "Thunder" teaser video via WAVE 3 News! Help us get the word out by sharing, and we'll see you down by the river in just a few weekends!
Ron Whitehead named State of Kentucky Beat Poet Laureate 2019-2021
“I am beyond honored to be named State of Kentucky Beat Poet Laureate 2019-2021. Having edited, published, shared the stage and page and practiced hangoutology and become friends with The Beat Generation and continuing to preach The Beat Gospel and The Kentucky Gospel wherever I go, and I go, well this is a big damn deal! I am grateful!! Thank you National Beat Poetry Foundation!!” — Ron Whitehead
“I have long admired Ron Whitehead. He is crazy as nine loons, and his poetry is a dazzling mix of folk wisdom and pure mathematics.” — Hunter S. Thompson
Poet, writer, editor, publisher, scholar, professor, activist Ron Whitehead grew up on a farm in Kentucky. He attended The University of Louisville and Oxford University. As poet and writer he is the recipient of numerous state, national, and international awards and prizes including The All Kentucky Poetry Prize, The Yeats Club of Oxford’s Prize for Poetry, and many others. In 2006 Dr. John Rocco (NYC) nominated Ron for The Nobel Prize in Literature.
Ron has edited and published the works of such luminaries as His Holiness The Dalai Lama, President Jimmy Carter, Hunter S. Thompson, Thomas Merton, Jack Kerouac, Seamus Heaney, Wendell Berry, Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono, BONO, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Herbert Huncke, Diane di Prima, Douglas Brinkley, Robert Hunter, Amiri Baraka, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and hundreds more.
Ron Whitehead has produced over 2,000 historic Arts Events, Festivals, and 24-48-72 & 90-hour non-stop music & poetry Insomniacathons, across the USA and in Europe, from New York City to New Orleans to The Netherlands and beyond.
Ron has performed thousands of shows around the world with some of the best musicians and bands on the planet. He recently returned from a Scandinavia Tour with Paris, France rock band Blaak Heat and from three New York City trips where his new book "blistered asphalt on dixie highway: Kentucky Basketball is Poetry in Motion" was released by Finishing Line Press at the historic Poets House.
Ron's work has been translated into nearly 20 languages. He is the author of 30 books and 40 albums. Songs and Poems from The KENTUCKY BOUND Concert (sonaBLAST! Records), companion to Ron’s new KENTUCKY BOUND: poems, stories, and songs book, were released November 17th at the opening of the Louisville Free Library’s big POETS, ROCK STARS, & HOLY MEN: A LITERARY RENAISSANCE Posters & Correspondence Exhibit. At the event, Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer presented Ron with a City of Louisville Proclamation thanking Ron for his Lifetime Achievement of Supporting The Arts.
Mark Geary Announces East Coast Tour Dates
NEW SHOW ANNOUNCEMENTS! Just in... Our good buddy, Mark Geary just announced a slew of East Coast shows! Mark your calendars, and stream his latest release on your favorite streaming platform ---> https://onerpm.com/al/2390160548
Ron Whitehead releases THE DANCE on sonaBLAST Records!
We’re excited to announce the official new release from Louisville’s very own, Ron Whitehead. The Dance is the seductively brilliant new 10 recordings, 5 videos, art, and photography Installation by world renowned poet Ron Whitehead in collaboration with The Glass Eye Ensemble featuring Sheri Streeter. The project is based on 10 Ron Whitehead poems. The Glass Eye Ensemble includes composer, musician, and theatre artist Gabriel Walker, Cuban filmmaker, photographer, and painter Yunier Ramirez, filmmaker, photographer, and foley artist Tammy Richardson, and portrait painter and animator Purion Parker. The project features singer songwriter Sheri Streeter. Download your copy from your favorite music streaming service here: https://onerpm.com/al/3370553856
This fully immersive installation will run through March 21st.
THE DANCE is a mythic exploration of one woman's and one man's journey to recover to discover their souls. THE DANCE is the hero’s journey every seeker must take…if we can find the courage…and if we can survive the journey.
She left Kentucky, departing for the American southwest. She took with her more than the $23 and the ‘46 Dodge pickup he gifted her. In the aftermath, he abandons his bereft life and heads to the New Mexico desert – uncertain if it’s to lose himself, find himself, or kill himself. What he finds there shatters his reality. Nothing will ever be the same.
"Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth – penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words. Beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told."
--Joseph Campbell
Knowledge, from the inception of Modernism, and through postmodernism to the Ocean of Consciousness, is reorganized, redefined through literature, art, music, dance, photography, and film. The genres are changing, the canons are exploding, as is culture. The mythopoetics, the privileged sense of sight, of modern, contemporary, avant-garde poets, composers, musicians, artists, dancers, photographers, filmmakers are examples of art forms of a society, a culture, a civilization, a world in which humanity lives, not securely in cities nor innocently in the country, but on the apocalyptic, simultaneous edge of a new realm of being and understanding. The mythopoet, female and male, returns to the role of prophet-seer by creating myths that resonate in the minds of readers, myths that speak with the authority of the ancient myths, myths that are gifts from the shadow, from the holy unholy realms of the creative imagination.
THE DANCE is a Howard & Nancy Bruner Wilson & sonABLAST records release.
Cat Casual, aka William Benton from Lucky Pineapple, signs to sonaBLAST! Records!
We’re ecstatic to announce that our good friend, William Benton, has just signed on with sonaBLAST! Records to release The Secret Self, Benton’s new full-length album.
William Benton, aka Cat Casual, is a multi-instrumentalist and songwriter who has supplied guitar and bass for artists like Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Shilpa Ray (Nick Cave’s Bad Seed Ltd. label), The Phantom Family Halo (Knitting Factory Records), Ivan Julian (Richard Hell and the Voidoids)- and has collaborated with legendary musicians such as Steve Wynn (Dream Syndicate), Steve Shelley(Sonic Youth), Makoto Kawabata (Acid Mothers Temple)...among others.
He has also supplied music for television (including Jersey Shore), short films, and off-off Broadway productions.
Born and raised in Oklahoma, Benton divides his time and work between Louisville, Kentucky, and the New York area.
The first Cat Casual release (Cat Casual and the Holy Midnight), smashed open the rusty gates, releasing Benton's psyche-inspired, cinematic, troubadour-ish persona upon the world. (The record opens with Sending- “...a collaboration with Bonnie "Prince" Billy that sounds like Suicide, Grinderman, and a chain gang produced something unholy in a musical laboratory...”)
The Final Word- the most recent backing band that he has assembled- is fearlessly executing reinterpretations of previous Cat Casual songs as well as delivering the latest material: some of the most interesting, heady, unpredictable-yet-accessible music that Louisville and Benton himself have ever produced.
Cat Casual and the Final Word recently recorded, mixed, and mastered the full-length The Secret Self with Mike Bridavsky at Russian Recording in Bloomington, Indiana at the end of 2018, looking to release the album in the summer of 2019.
Local and regional live dates/touring beginning in the spring.
https://soundcloud.com/william-benton-1/sets/cat-casual-and-the-final-word-the-secret-self/s-an7d5
https://soundcloud.com/william-benton-1/sets/cat-casual-and-the-final-word-the-secret-self/s-an7d5 (instrumental version)
Mastered for digital, compact disc, and vinyl.
Photo taken by Matthew Roos