Marc Ribot: Party Intellectuals

Marc Ribot’s Ceramic Dog: Party Intellectuals

Marc Ribot

Party Intellectuals is the debut recording from Marc Ribot’s Ceramic Dog, a post-everything band combining the energies of two masters of downtown New York City mayhem: guitarist/vocalist Marc Ribot (Tom Waits, John Zorn, Robert Plant, T-Bone Burnett, Marianne Faithful, Lounge Lizards, Elvis Costello) and bassist Shahzad Ismaily (Laurie Anderson, Will Oldham, Jolie Holland, Secret Chiefs 3), with West Coast indie/experimental genius drummer Ches Smith (Xiu Xiu, Secret Chiefs 3, Trevor Dunn’s Trio Convulsant). Ribot is a widely recognized original on the guitar, with influence across multiple genres of music, including rock, jazz, punk, Latin, soul, 80s No-Wave, avant-garde and noise. Ceramic Dog draws all of this, along with Ismaily and Smith’s indie / electronica experimentation, into the power-packed Party Intellectuals.

Ceramic Dog grew out of a post 9/11 bucket list, when Ribot decided to find out what would happen if he did away with the hyphens haunting his earlier projects: the punk-Latin Cubanos Postizos, the punk-experimental Shrek, and the punk-Albert Ayler Spiritual Unity. It took several years of searching before Ribot found, in Ches Smith and Shahzad Ismaily, the rhythm section with the energy for The Thing itself. Says Ribot, “This is the first time since high school I’ve been in a real rock band. We actually get together to rehearse just for the fun of it, even when we don’t have gigs!”

The name Ceramic Dog is from the French expression “chien de faïence,” meaning frozen with emotion – like bristling dogs the moment before they fight, or lovers immobilized in one another’s gaze. Live and on Party Intellectuals, the band aims at that intensity, creating hypnotic moments of ecstasy, violence, idiocy, beauty; in other words – pure rock and roll.

Party Intellectuals comes out June 24, 2008 on Pi Recordings.

Upcoming Shows:
04.23 – New York, NY – Sullivan Hall
06.19 – Brooklyn, NY – Prospect Park (Celebrate Brooklyn w/ Medeski Martin and Wood – FREE)

“Ceramic Dog made a hard kind of sense. With Mr. Ribot on guitar, Shahzad Ismaily on bass and Moog synthesizer, and Ches Smith on drums, it delivered a blast of sound that was variously ominous, crude and sly. There were handclaps and Cuban montuños; there was numbskull punk and roadhouse blues; there was the odd doom-metal drone… Prickly but popular, with a mood both breezy and intense.” –The New York Times