Benefit for Bed Stuy w/ Leverage Models, Gemma, Erica Eso, Field Guides

Leverage Models makes secular folk songs about transubstantiation, ritual abuse, political apathy, divorce, white collar criminals, poverty, anxiety, & self-harm. With timbales.


Gemma is an electro pop group led by vocalist Felicia Douglass (Ava Luna) and producer Erik Gundel. Their debut album, As Ever, is due out 10/2.


Erica Eso is a microtonal pop project founded by composer and synthesizer player, Weston Minissali of Cloud Becomes Your Hand. "Erica Eso's synth­heavy pop melodies are a clear departure from the otherworldly avant­rock sound of Cloud Becomes Your Hand, but ...Minissali's talents as an experimental composer span across genres." (The Deli Magazine) The brooklyn­based quartet is comprised of Rhonda Lowry on drums, Nathaniel Morgan on bass and Ellen O'Meara on synthesizer. This October they will be touring the east coast and midwest in support of their debut album "2019" out on Ramp Local Records on October 16th. Primarily composed in an attic, 2019 (a date in time, a lucky anagram, or maybe just an arbitrary value deemed significant) is the debut album of Erica Eso (a name plus music, an empty bracket, not an alter ego). The album exhibits abstract sound palettes willfully submitting to the globalized pop song structure. Synthesizers born of distorted sign waves and quarter tone temperament join with an unknown loner's fragile falsetto singing proudly of loss and rebirth. Songs like "One Hundred Years," "Neer Me Ruuner," and "Crippled Symmetry," celebrate the clean, gridded pulse of the dance floor, but the instinctive spirit of the record lies in the murky, arrhythmic swells and clicks of tracks like "Iris Kyle" and "Am Eve Erica." But whose femininity is hollering out amongst this reverb?


"Field Guides began in 2012 as the solo recording project of Brooklyn singer/songwriter Benedict Kupstas. Thoughtful and eccentric, his music has an experimental nature to it, blending warm, jangling indie pop with a pastiche of field recordings from his various travels. His first release under the Field Guides name was a two-song single on his Bandcamp page called There Is Always Someone Waiting Somewhere Else. Over the next two years, the project began to grow into a band as Kupstas recruited various musicians from the local Brooklyn scene to join him. The rotating lineup includes current and former members of acts like Helado Negro, Cloud Becomes Your Hand, Landlady, and Future Wife, among others. Their debut record was recorded over several years in Brooklyn and mixed in upstate New York by veteran engineer D. James Goodwin (Devo, Kaki King, Leverage Models). Named after a Richard Brautigan poem, Boo, Forever was released in November 2014."—Timothy Monger, All Music

"Field Guides began as a solo project of Benedict Kupstas, who seems as confident writing millennial country duets like "Peggy Asked A Question & The Answer Is 'Yes' & 'Let's Keep Dancing'" and jangly summer pop songs like "Lisa Loeb Probably Never Pierced Her Ears" as he does on languid creepers like "I Wish All Our Hands". His songwriting is haunted with literary and musical references from Richard Brautigan and the Velvet Underground to Grace Krilanovich and Peggy Lee. As the songs developed, they accreted bits of found sound to themselves, crickets and bird noises, and, just as organically, the band added members of Helado Negro, Tarantula, Cloud Becomes Your Hand, Tiny Hazard, Eula, and The Ben Seretan Group."—Bob Proehl

"Like a book, Field Guides' debut album, Boo, Forever, is less a compendium of segregated tracks than it is a confluence, a narrative in sound. And like a book, Boo, Forever was written over the course of a decade. Initially a solo project helmed by Brooklyn writer and musician Benedict Kupstas, Field Guides grew to include a rotating lineup of a dozen or so musicians—and the band's considerable family tree has come to include current or former members of Helado Negro, Cloud Becomes Your Hand, Landlady, Tiny Hazard, Future Wife, and Tigue. Together, they achieve a profound sort of alchemy, in which disparate traditions, impulses, and interests coalesce into and intricate yet robust whole. Put more plainly: Boo, Forever is an album best listened to in its entirety every time, not because each track fails to stand on its own, but because—as a listener—you'd rather know what has come before, what comes next, and how the whole thing is woven together. Again, like a book."—Nate Brown