SHIT PYRE, 2016 – present
SHIT PYRE is a noise-rock band and art collective consisting of Marco D’Andrea, John Haney, and Mike Kennedy. Around a beery bar table in Hamilton, Ontario, the three friends dreamed of starting a band. The band remained an idea until an early spring camping trip in Algonquin Park, when the crackling sparks from a raging campfire, lifted into the starry night sky, birthed the name.
SHIT PYRE’s performances and installations are predicated on ritual, spectacle, and intense sensorial experience. Muddling the traditions of metal, psychedelia, ambient, and hard rock, SHIT PYRE’s music is completely free-improvised. The band’s performances and installations are offerings, and invite the audience to enter into a state of mutual creative energy and contemplation through an aesthetic, visceral overload. All of SHIT PYRE’s projects are site- and context-specific. When it’s possible, the band uses fire, old cars, whisky, kerosene, busted skids, shot-out barrels, forests, moon-soaked fields, and moon-pulled tides as props and backdrops. SHIT PYRE is a mongrel born of Catholic ritual, Blakeian mysticism, and deep-woods paganism, presided over by the twin spirits of rock’n’roll and Dada, creating a heady, charged space between that pulls together the hot earth and the cold cosmos. With both reverence and skepticism, the band members draw on the traditions and archetypes of their personal histories: big old cars, beer, hard rock, aspiration, and Friday-night-transcendence.
Select performances/installations include Maiden Voyage, 2016, at Strangewaves Festival (Paris, ON); Communion, 2016, and Rite of Spring, 2017 at Casino Art Space (Hamilton, ON); and Intertidal, 2017, at STRUTS Gallery (Sackville, NB).