TABLE OF THE ELEMENTS
RELAUNCH PARTY NO. 5
EVERLOVING PLAYS HENRY FLYNT • DAVID GRUBBS
July 12, 2025
6:00 PM –10:00 PM
FREE
P.I.T. means Property Is Theft.�411 South 5th St, �Los Sures, Williamsburg.�Brooklyn, NY 11211
“Flynt's avant-garde hillbilly music comes across as a movement consisting of a single practitioner; it is, and it isn't social music. In particular, his exuberant solo fiddle tunes such as ‘White Lightning’ and ‘Informal Hillbilly Jive’ cry out for accompaniment, for some kind of musical response to drive their headlong tempos toward even greater abandon.”
—David Grubbs, Records Ruin the Landscape
// JOIN US for a Table of the Elements relaunch party at P.I.T., Brooklyn. This is one of many pop-ups, listening parties, and special collaborations across key cities, celebrating an ambitious membership drive to support the 2025 season of new projects.
// JOIN OUR KICKSTARTER CAMPAIGN:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tote/table-of-the-elements?ref=d4klf8
// EVERLOVING:
“DEMOLISH SERIOUS CULTURE.”
Some 60-odd years ago, in gestures of solitary antiheroism, provocateur Henry Flynt deployed a sardonic agitprop Americana, These were not appropriations. They were assertions, derisive snorts of grit and gusto, hybridized sounds that drilled red-hot through contrarian pop stylings and erupted above classifications. Yet within them lurked an ache of the unobtainable—and an implicit challenge.
Today, in a spirit of affirmation and exaltation, the combative “supergroup” Everloving accepts Flynt’s call to action. However, this is no mere tribute act in which the covers smother. In the ebullient hustle of Everloving, the hot fuss ’n’ bother of yesteryear is churned at a vigorous 45 RPM to a jukebox-lubricating essence.
The careers of these various artists unwind with kudzu-tendriled resolve. Like Flynt before him, Jonathan Kane promulgates the physicality and spirit of the blues in irony-free romps that have energized 20th-century minimalism via collaborations with La Monte Young, Rhys Chatham, and Swans.
Peter Kerlin and Jim McHugh fueled Sunwatchers, whose anarchic psychedelia trampled various barricades with abandon. Dave Soldier has renounced classicism in collaborations with Guided By Voices, author Kurt Vonnegut, Talking Heads’ David Byrne, and the Velvet Underground’s John Cale.
Everloving is a triumphant singalong and clangorous Huzzah! from a like-minded gathering of pickers, fiddlers, and tub-thumpers who each reject designations, ossifications, and highfalutin encapsulation. In celebrating the essence of Henry Flynt, they assert collective agency with the low-down, hoe-down abandon that our tumultuous era demands.
// DAVID GRUBBS:
“If you wanted to, you could describe him as highly postmodern. Either way, he is one of the most adventurous, uncompromising and thoughtful figures on the experimental side of American composition.”
—The Quietus
Table of the Elements, 1996: For those with grit, it was a ride in the whirlwind. Behind was the Atlanta Manganese festival, a trailhead at which Tony Conrad initiated the greenhorns, an unknown Jim O’Rourke was introduced to Sonic Youth, and where Keiji Haino, Faust, and Dead C’s Michael Morley were first coaxed to tread American soil. Ahead was the Chicago Yttrium festival, a defiant, post-genre crossroads of 20th-century aural resolve. In between, Tony Conrad recorded, toured, and recorded again with Gastr del Sol; the label introduced O’Rourke to John Fahey, then Fahey to Loren Connors, and then reintroduced Fahey to the world—a flash in which all dizzying currents converged.�
Serenely in the eye stood David Grubbs—observer, participant, and facilitator — and from that stance emerged his solo debut, Banana Cabbage, Potato Lettuce, Onion Orange (awarded “Best Title of 1997” by The Wire). The original tagline waggishly declared, “…in which a solo record = record of solos and less is not MOR.” True. At no hour does Grubbs traffic in noodly, middle-of-the-road equivocation. These are deliberate and thoughtful excursions, charted with mindful, patient authority and executed in a spirit of comradely challenge.
While comparisons to Morton Feldman were tolerable on release, present-day ears will discern a wry and roiling phraseology that flows from Squirrel Bait through a subsequent and vast creative output. Many of those works appear on Grubbs’s Blue Chopsticks label and its patron Drag City, which has also preserved several of his TotE recordings with Gastr del Sol. But it's Banana Cabbage, Potato Lettuce, and Onion Orange that christens the launch of Table of the Elements Archive, informing the nucleus of an inspiringly tempestuous past and an explosive, radiant future.
// TABLE OF THE ELEMENTS is a curatorial platform, interdisciplinary production organization, live-event presenter, and fine-arts print, audio, and film publisher, lauded by Pitchfork Media as “a national treasure.” Since its inception as a record label in 1993, TotE has been dedicated to preserving, promoting, and disseminating works by international creators of experimental audio, avant-garde performance, and modern composition. The label’s 150-plus releases are a vital contemporary chronicle, a survey of meaningful eruptions across a broad horizon of sound and vision. Each project demonstrates how a publishing concern might romp wild, unbridled from the carousel of convention.
“The supremacy of Table of the Elements as an unwavering outpost of ultra-experimental strains can be attributed to its concomitant adherence to valiance. Most of the Table of the Elements catalog has no broad commercial appeal, and many of its projects are risky ventures, even with respect to the experimental marketplace. Yet, this philosophy of risk works because everybody associated with the label feels like they're doing important work releasing important records, and they're willing to go for broke to make it happen.”
—Grayson Currin, Pitchfork
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