Punk poet provocateur, musician and photographer, the legendary Lydia Lunch has announced a musical poetry tour of Australia entitled ‘Tales of Lust & Madness’ with fellow New Yorker Joseph Keckler. Lunch’s collaborations with the late great Rowland S Howard, amongst others, are legendary. Keckler is an American singer, musician, performing artist and writer. He writes and performs both absurdist operatic monologues and eerie, emotive ballads. He has also created videos and has authored numerous evening-length performance pieces.
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.
The dates for the tour are as follows:
Fri March 14 – Primrose Potter Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre, Victoria – Tickets
Sun March 17 – Theatre Royale, Castlemain, Victoria (including screening of Lydia Lunch: The War is Never Over with Lydia Lunch Q&A ***) – Tickets
Fri March 22 – The Great Club, Sydney, NSW – Tickets
Sat March 23 – MONA, Nilan Gallery, Hobart, TAS – Tickets
