Press Play presents Tales of Lust & Madness, a new show from Lydia Lunch, New York’s “punk poet queen of extremities” (The Independent), and Joseph Keckler, a singular performer once crowned “best downtown performance artist” in New York City by The Village Voice. Combining the dynamic spoken word of Lunch and the dark humour and unnerving musicality of Keckler, Tales of Lust & Madness brings two of New York’s most notorious performers together to create an intimate evening of provocative musical poetry.
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Passionate, confrontational and bold. Whether attacking the patriarchy and their pornographic war mongering, turning the sexual into political or whispering a love song to the broken hearted, Lydia Lunch’s fierce energy and rapid-fire delivery lend testament to her warrior nature.
Queen of No Wave, muse of The Cinema of Transgression, Lydia Lunch has released too many musical projects to tally, has been on tour for decades, has published dozens of articles, half a dozen books and simply refuses to just shut up. She performs in a variety of mediums and continues to release new music as well as re-issuing classic material from her vast catalogue of written and musical works.
A rabid collaborator, Lunch has famously worked with the likes of Nick Cave, Rowland S. Howard, Henry Rollins, Sonic Youth, Einstürzende Neubauten among others. Her decades long career is the subject of a new feature length documentary Lydia Lunch: The War is Never Over.
Performing in Australia for the first time, Joseph Keckler is a singular artist who performs in a genre of his own design that fuses operatic vocals and contemporary subject matter into absurd and affecting underworld voyages. He has been described by the New York Times as a “major vocal talent… with a range that shatters the boundaries… a trickster’s dark humor, and a formidable musical and literary erudition”.
Keckler made his off-Broadway debut in Preludes in 2015, portraying the opera singer and longtime friend to Sergei Rachmaninoff, Feodor Chaliapin, and his first collection of writing, Dragon at the Edge of a Flat World was published by Turtle Point Press in 2018. In 2019 he premiered two works, Train With No Midnight at NYC’s Prototype Festival and Let Me Die (a “greatest hits of death scenes from classic opera” – The Wall Street Journal) with Opera Philadelphia and toured the U.S. as the national support act for rock band Sleater-Kinney.
Joseph Keckler is the light to Lydia Lunch’s shade.
