Album Release and Film Screening 

Howl! Arts/Howl! Archive celebrates the release of Allen Ginsberg’s The Fall of America Vol II, a musical interpretation of poems from Ginsberg’s The Fall of America: Poems of These States 1965-1971.

Join us for a film screening including Philip Glass & Allen Ginsberg’s Have you Seen this Movie, Ai Weiwei and O_Future‘s Allen Ginsberg’s Hum Bom, Jack Dangers & Allen Ginsberg‘s Holy Ghost on the Nod over the Body of Bliss, CJ Mirra and Kai Campos & Allen Ginsberg‘s Bixby Canyon, and Seb Taylor & Allen Ginsberg, Over Denver Again.

Vinyl and CDs will be available for purchase at the event. All proceeds from sales will benefit Pen America.

The Fall of America Volume II, a musical tribute to Allen Ginsberg to benefit Pen America will be released digitally as well as on CD and vinyl on October 6, 2023, via Allen Ginsberg Recordings. The album features performances by Ai Weiwei, Philip Glass, Anne Waldman, Thurston Moore With Saul Williams, Devendra Banhart, Miho Hatori, Jack Dangers, Yoni Wolf, Fennesz & Taylor Deupree, Stephen Hillage & Miquette Giraudy, Kai Campos & Cj Mirra, Dj Spooky / Aka That Subliminal Kid Feat Antoine Drye, and more.

“Allen could often seamlessly mix the secular with the divine, the past to the future, and enact transformation and liberation through poetry. It’s an honor to mouth these words with the shaping of music composed here.” – Anne Waldman

“Well, here we are now dearest Allen, rallying and resisting, revolting and revealing, your ‘prophecy’ in constant manifestation, fighting fascism as soldiers of peace, informed by your singing out from the ‘mind jail.’” -Thurston Moore

“Allen’s spirit of true freedom clearly resonates in his words & in the soul that he was.” -Ai Weiwei

“Wow! It’s just like when we used to perform together! It’s like the pieces were made for each other.” – Philip Glass

PRE-ORDER THE FALL OF AMERICA VOLUME II 

Fall of America Poems published by City Lights Books in San Francisco, covers the years 1965-1971 when Ginsberg was crisscrossing the country, exploring a system of composition by narrating into the portable reel-to-reel Uher that Bob Dylan had gifted him.

“In 1965, Ginsberg began planning an ambitious project, a book of thematically connected poems, a collection that ‘discovered’ America in poetry similar to the way Kerouac’s On the Road had explored the country in prose. The Vietnam War would be a constant presence overhanging Ginsberg’s travel writings like a darkening shadow affecting daily life in the country. It would be a study of contrasts: natural beauty slammed up against an ugliness that rose out of the tensions of violence. The public’s polarized dialogue over Vietnam and, earlier in the decade, the civil rights movement, convinced Ginsberg that America was teetering on the precipice of a fall.”

– Michael Schumacher, from Introduction to The Fall of America Journals 1965-1971

For more information and to preview tracks please contact (co-producers) Peter Hale [email protected] & Jesse Goodman [email protected]