Northern Spy
MARVIN PONTIAC - The Asylum Tapes LP
$35.95
Record Store Day 2020.
Marvin Pontiac was anonymously sent a 4 track tape recorder during the years he was held at Esmerelda State Mental Institution. This is what he did with it.
The musician, actor, and painter John Lurie is known for many things: The Lounge Lizards, starring in Jim Jarmusch films, creating one of the funniest television shows in history (‘Fishing With John’), and his Grammy nominated score for Get Shorty. Lurie’s compositions under the Marvin Pontiac pseudonym have developed a legendary reputation from fans and critics alike.
"Into this ridiculous, tragic mess, returns the greatest fake musician of the last fifty years, John Lurie. By fake, I mean real, realer-than-real: surreal." – George Grella in The Brooklyn Rail
"You ever listen to Bill Walton do a basketball game and suddenly he smokes so much weed that he takes a left turn? That's kinda Marvin Pontiac" – John Lurie discusses The Asylum Tapes with Jonathan Capehart on WNYC
"Our hunger for the authentic or the unmediated has mostly begotten us a cavalcade of deeply unreliable things, such as Donald Trump, laminate flooring, fake-fake news, artisanal moonshine, and reality television. And so, somehow, it is Marvin Pontiac who ends up delivering, on the album’s fifty-six-second opening track, what feels like the most reasonable and perceptive coda to 2017: “It’s really unbelievable, the beauty and the horror of this life,” he repeats. “It’s really unbelievable.” – Amanda Petrusich, The New Yorker
Marvin Pontiac was anonymously sent a 4 track tape recorder during the years he was held at Esmerelda State Mental Institution. This is what he did with it.
The musician, actor, and painter John Lurie is known for many things: The Lounge Lizards, starring in Jim Jarmusch films, creating one of the funniest television shows in history (‘Fishing With John’), and his Grammy nominated score for Get Shorty. Lurie’s compositions under the Marvin Pontiac pseudonym have developed a legendary reputation from fans and critics alike.
"Into this ridiculous, tragic mess, returns the greatest fake musician of the last fifty years, John Lurie. By fake, I mean real, realer-than-real: surreal." – George Grella in The Brooklyn Rail
"You ever listen to Bill Walton do a basketball game and suddenly he smokes so much weed that he takes a left turn? That's kinda Marvin Pontiac" – John Lurie discusses The Asylum Tapes with Jonathan Capehart on WNYC
"Our hunger for the authentic or the unmediated has mostly begotten us a cavalcade of deeply unreliable things, such as Donald Trump, laminate flooring, fake-fake news, artisanal moonshine, and reality television. And so, somehow, it is Marvin Pontiac who ends up delivering, on the album’s fifty-six-second opening track, what feels like the most reasonable and perceptive coda to 2017: “It’s really unbelievable, the beauty and the horror of this life,” he repeats. “It’s really unbelievable.” – Amanda Petrusich, The New Yorker
