John Cale | Tomberlin

Doors 6:30pm/Show 7:30pm

Join us on Sat, August 19 for a 2023 BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn! concert featuring John Cale and Tomberlin.

Never shying away from risk taking, John Cale wants us to reimagine what music can be. A founder of the band The Velvet Underground which fundamentally changed rock music, Cale continues to strip away formulas and invent new ways of creating and listening. We are honored to have him grace our stage with his infinite wit and talent. Tomberlin, our opener, complements her emotionally hefty lyrics with sparse and delicate instrumentation, using her music as a sonic altar to both examine and hold our collective feelings.

*Please Note: A limited amount of chairs will be available at this show, but you are also permitted to bring your own. For our d/Deaf and hard of hearing communities, we will have an ASL interpreter at the left side of the stage. 

About the artists

What does John Cale have that the rest of us don’t – some gene that engenders infinite restlessness, a rapacious mind that is never satisfied? For nearly 60 years, or at least since he was a young Welshman who moved to New York and formed The Velvet Underground, Cale has been reinventing his music with dazzling and inspiring regularity. To wit, in those early days of fundamentally changing rock ’n’ roll, he was also making ecstatic viola drones and playing with La Monte Young’s epochal ensemble. There was the bewitching chamber folk of Paris 1919 followed instantly by the gnarled rock of Fear, the provocative and spare song cycle Music for a New Society followed more than 30 years later by mighty and unabashed electronic updates. Are there straight lines between collaborators Lou Reed and Danger Mouse and Sharon Van Etten, or between the avant-garde of downtown New York in the ’60s and that of the Internet right now other than John Cale? Once again, here is Cale, reimagining how his music is made, sounds, and even works. His engrossing 12-track MERCY (2023) – his first full album of new tunes in a decade – moves through true dark-night of-the-soul electronic torment toward vulnerable love songs and hopeful considerations for the future with the help of some of music’s most curious young minds. Laurel Halo, Sylvan Esso, Animal Collective: They’re but half of the astounding cast here, brilliant musicians who climb inside Cale’s consummate vision of the world and help him redecorate there.

Tomberlin is Sarah Beth Tomberlin, a pastor’s kid born in Florida, raised in rural Illinois. She wrote the majority of her debut, At Weddings (2018), while living at home. For a while after leaving home and church, she lived in Louisville, Kentucky. She worked a day job and kept writing songs. She posted some of these songs to Bandcamp, which led to her signing a record deal with Saddle Creek. It all happened fast: Less than a year after her first live show, she performed on Jimmy Kimmel and she ended up moving to L.A. which is where she wrote Projections (2020), her EP followup to At Weddings. During the pandemic, Sarah Beth was all over the place, physically and mentally. Louisville. Los Angeles. Back home in Illinois for a bit. Brooklyn, where she’s now settled, she says. Brooklyn is also where her new album i don’t know who needs to hear this… was recorded, at Figure 8 studios over the course of two weeks, with producer and engineer Phil Weinrobe (who played a variety of instruments on the collection), and later mastered by Josh Bonati, also in Brooklyn.