AMERICAN FEVER: A TALE OF ROMANCE & PESTILENCE

Come celebrate the thrilling conclusion of our global quest for a compelling book trailer on Friday, Sept. 28, at AMERICAN FEVER’s Musical Multimedia Book Video Party at Williamsburg’s IndieScreen cinema & bar.

Publisher Arterial Witness will honor the best videos created by artists on three continents to represent Peter Christian Hall’s novel, AMERICAN FEVER: A TALE OF ROMANCE & PESTILENCE, with a special event at Williamsburg’s IndieScreen cinema & bar on Friday, Sept. 28. Doors open at 7 pm, followed by an evening of live music, readings, video screenings, and awards. Special guests include various incarnations of composer-performers Dan Cooper (& Erbium), Patrick Grant, Milica Paranosic, and Gene Pritsker (also DJing his fabulous ‘Fever Remix’).

Competing 73-second videos—crafted to a stirring original score created by GANG OF FOUR’s ANDY GILL—shall be honored as “Scariest,” “Most Romantic,” “Most Microbial,” and “Audience Favorite,” and then a cash prize of $1,000 will be awarded to the entry chosen to officially represent American Fever: A Tale of Romance & Pestilence.

American Fever (synopsis) presents an East Village blogger’s view of a harrowing H5N1 avian flu pandemic that rocks America and unleashes national repression, even as his personal life explodes with promise. The novel is “a modern take on Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year” (Kirkus Reviews) that has been hailed as “compelling” (Publisher’s Weekly PW Select), “suspenseful and terrifying” (Midwest Book Review), and “by far the best stab at the future of the novel I’ve seen” (TeleRead).

Author PETER CHRISTIAN HALL, writer (Rolling Stone, the Village Voice, the New York Times, Reuters.com, Mother Jones, and The Big Money) and filmmaker (Delinquent), will read excerpts from American Fever. (One will trigger a Composers Concordance Trio jam conceived by Milica Paranosic.) Copies of American Fever will be available for purchase, complete with inscrutable scrawls by the author.

GENE PRITSKER, who has written more than 400 compositions performed around the world by symphony orchestras and hip-hop and rock ensembles, will appear with Composers Concordance Trio. He recently orchestrated the score (and contributed original music) for the forthcoming Cloud Atlas, co-written and co-directed by Andy and Lana Wachowski (the Matrix trilogy) and Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run; Perfume). As Noizepunk, Pritsker will mix pestilential music, too!

MILICA PARANOSIC is a one-woman world of sound and vision whose music reflects influences from her youth in Serbia to the electronic dimensions she teaches at the Juilliard School. Paranosic, who has been described as a “musical Jackson Pollack” (SEAMUS) and “amazing … astonishing” by the New York Times, will appear with Composers Concordance Trio and will soon debut a composition commissioned by the American Composer’s Orchestra at Carnegie Hall.

PATRICK GRANT, notorious composer, performer, and producer whose music adventures include John Cage, Quincy Jones, Robert Fripp, the Living Theatre, Robert Wilson, and the invention of the electric guitar parade, will perform vivid, even shocking selections from his ongoing solo work, The Velcro Variations, as well as a wild new-dada piece with Erbium.

DAN COOPER is a subtle and engaging multi-instrumentalist and composer from the island of Manhattan. His music has been described as “full of instrumental virtuosity and sly humor” (Fanfare) and “especially fascinating” (American Record Guide). Cooper will appear with Composers Concordance Trio (with LYNN BECHTOLD) and with Erbium, the suggestive, dynamic combo he founded with DANIEL PALKOWSKI.

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WHO: Publisher Arterial Witness and author Peter Christian Hall, with special guests Milica Paranosic, Patrick Grant, Dan Cooper, Gene Pritsker, and collaborators.
WHAT: The launch of the official video for Hall’s AMERICAN FEVER: A TALE OF ROMANCE & PESTILENCE.
WHERE: IndieScreen, located at 285 Kent Ave. at South 2^nd Street, Williamsburg,
Brooklyn, NY.
WHEN: Doors open at 7 p.m.  No cover charge.

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