NEW YORK, NY.- The second It Came from Brooklyn concert will take place September 25, 2009, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum with performances by Julian Plenti (aka Paul Banks of Interpol) and I’m In You and readings by authors Rivka Galchen and Hampton Fancher. Comedian Eugene Mirman will serve as the MC for the evening.

It Came from Brooklyn, the new concert series showcasing Brooklyn’s emerging and established talents in the fields of music and literature was conceived by coproducers Sam Brumbaugh and Bronwyn Keenan as part of the museum’s 50th Anniversary celebrations. The title of the series references Robert Gordon’s book It Came from Memphis, which details the birth of rock-n-roll in the 1950s.

“Over the past decade, Brooklyn has emerged as a place of astonishing artistic creativity and interdisciplinary experimentation,” said Brumbaugh, “Our aim is to share the spirit of this scene with the museum’s audience and beyond, while keeping a local feel for New Yorkers.”

Each program takes place in the famed Frank Lloyd Wright–designed rotunda and features live bands, literary readings, and comedy from 8 pm to 12 am. Audiences also have the opportunity to visit select sections of the Vasily Kandinsky retrospective on view this fall. “It Came from Brooklyn is meant to have a cabaret-like atmosphere,” Brumbaugh continued, “We want to offer a good night out, with music, comedy, literature, and art––all in one program.”

“Frank Lloyd Wright designed the Guggenheim to be a social space that engages the public,” said Keenan, who is Associate Director of Special Events at the museum. “The audience can move up and around the spiraling ramp during the acts for a concert experience that is at once monumental and intimate, a powerful contrast intrinsic to the series.”

Julian Plenti
Paul Banks of the critically acclaimed indie band Interpol has performed acoustically since 1998. His first solo effort, Julian Plenti is… Skyscraper was just released in August by Matador Records under the pseudonym Julian Plenti. Recorded at the Seaside Lounge in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and at Electric Lady Studios in Manhattan, the debut album features keyboards, horns, and strings augmenting guitars, bass, and drums, offering both ethereal soundscapes and urgent rock songs. For It Came from Brooklyn, Banks will perform selections from the album with his mostly Brooklyn-based band. Though Banks had a rehearsal space with Interpol in Brooklyn for years, he currently splits his time between Panama and the greater New York area. It Came from Brooklyn is Julian Plenti’s first public performance since 2002.

I’m In You
The musical investigations of Brooklyn-based experimental band I’m In You have been described as part post-rock and part afro-punk disco, part cinematic soul. Band members Chris McHenry, Sebastian Ischer, Dmitiry Ishenko, and Andrei Zakow experiment with minimalist rhythm, heartbreak strings, free jazz horns, and noise-damaged guitars, the whole underscored by foreboding lyrics about relations of power and man's existential limitations. They released their first LP War Dreams in 2008 and recently recorded the EP A Lurid View. For It Came from Brooklyn, they will perform an orchestral set highlighting their rhythmic and textural approach, with Glenn White and Mike Irwin on horns, Erica Dicker on violin, Katie Young on bassoon, and Monique Letamendi and Ricky Suarez on backing vocals. The band’s many members have lived, worked, rehearsed, recorded, and performed in Brooklyn since 2007.

Hampton Fancher
Born in east LA, Hampton Fancher left home at 15, went to Europe, became a dancer, then retired five years later to become an actor. Under contract to various Hollywood studios throughout the ‘60s and early ‘70s, he appeared in “lots of bad TV and some unremarkable movies here and abroad,” all the while making short films, directing plays, and teaching. At 40, he gave up acting to concentrate on writing and directing, completing a dozen scripts, among them Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner, Mighty Quinn, and The Minus Man, which he also directed. Fancher has taught screenwriting at Columbia and NYU and is currently working on a book of short stories for Simon & Schuster. For It Came from Brooklyn, Fancher will read from the work of former Driggs Avenue resident, the legendary and peripatetic Henry Miller, whom Fancher met for the first time in 1957, when he was 18 and Miller was 66. Fancher is Rivka Galchen’s next-door neighbor in Brooklyn Heights.

Rivka Galchen
Rivka Galchen received her MD from Mount Sinai in 2003 and her MFA from Columbia University in 2006. She is the author of the widely acclaimed debut novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, about a psychiatrist who becomes convinced that his wife has been replaced by a simulacrum. The novel was named a 2008 New York Times Notable Book and one of the best books of the year by numerous publications including Slate.com and Salon.com. Galchen’s essays and stories have appeared in Harper’s, Zoetrope, The New Yorker, The Believer, Scientific American, and the New York Times. For It Came from Brooklyn, Galchen will read from the work of one of her favorite writers, the American novelist and short-story writer Jane Bowles, who for a time shared a rooming house in Brooklyn Heights with her husband Paul Bowles, poet W. H. Auden, burlesque star and novelist Gypsy Rose Lee, and a circus animal trainer with two live-in chimps. Galchen is Hampton Fancher’s next-door neighbor in Brooklyn Heights.

Eugene Mirman
Brooklyn-resident Eugene Mirman is a Russian-born comedian who grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts and majored in comedy at Hampshire College. Mirman has appeared on several TV shows, including in his own half-hour special on Comedy Central, Late Night with Conan O'Brien, Last Call with Carson Daly, a recurring role on HBO’s Flight of the Conchords, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Home Movies, Lucy, Daughter of the Devil, and the Adult Swim live action series Delocated. Mirman tours the US regularly and has released several comedy albums. His latest, due out in October from Sub Pop records is called God Is a Twelve-Year-Old Boy with Asperger’s. He’s also written a parody self-help guide to modern life entitled The Will To Whatevs, published by HarperCollins. Most recently, Mirman has been hosting shows in the Park Slope and Gowanus neighborhoods of Brooklyn while working on the September production of his second annual Eugene Mirman Comedy Festival