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  • Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album

    Complete 20 tracks and liner notes booklet with poems.

    Includes unlimited streaming of Allen Ginsberg’s The Fall of America: A 50th Anniversary Musical Tribute via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
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  • Record/Vinyl + Digital Album

    The track listing for the vinyl is as follows:

    Side A
    1) Scanner - Elegy for Neal Cassady
    2) Shintaro Sakamoto - Manhattan Thirties Flash
    3) Thurston Moore & Lee Ranaldo - Hum Bom
    4) Ed Sanders (The Fugs) - Memory Gardens
    5) Mickey Hart - First Party at Ken Kesey's With Hell's Angels (Drones Du Jour)
    6) Howie B with Gavin Friday - Death On All Fronts (America is Falling)
    7) Disco Pusher - A Prophecy

    Side B
    1) Angélique Kidjo - Uluru Song
    2) Bill Frisell - Over Laramie
    3) Andrew Bird - Easter Sunday
    4) Devendra Banhart - Milarepa Taste
    5) Yo La Tengo - Bayonne Entering N.Y.C.
    6) Lang Lee - Pain on All Fronts

    Includes unlimited streaming of Allen Ginsberg’s The Fall of America: A 50th Anniversary Musical Tribute via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    ... more
    ships out within 7 days
    Purchasable with gift card

      $19.98 USD or more 

     

about

I've almost never composed and sung a song with lyrics written by someone other than myself, and this experience of doing so to a poem by a person from a different country and time was a very special one. Allen Ginsberg's English words were translated to Korean, so singing with these "translated Korean" lyrics was yet another challenge, which turned out to be interesting. - Lang Lee

lyrics

Death On All Fronts

“The Planet Is Finished”

A new moon looks down on our sick sweet planet
Orion’s chased the Immovable Bear halfway across the sky
from winter to winter. I wake, earlier in bed, fly corpses
cover gas lit sheets, my head aches, left temple
brain fibre throbbing for Death I Created on all Fronts.
Poisoned rats in the Chickenhouse and myriad lice
Sprayed with white arsenics filtering to the brook, City Cockroaches
stomped on Country kitchen floors. No babies for me.
Cut earth boys & girl hordes by half & breathe free
say Revolutionary expert Computers:
Half the blue globe’s germ population’s more than enough,
keep the cloudy lung from stinking pneumonia.
I called in Exterminator Who soaked the Wall floor with
bed-bug death-oil: Who’ll soak my brain with death-oil?
I wake before dawn, dreading my wooden possessions,
my gnostic books, my loud mouth, old loves silent, charms
turned to image money, my body sexless fat, Father dying,
Earth Cities poisoned at war, my art hopeless—
Mind fragmented—and still abstract—Pain in
left temple living death—

Cherry Valley, September 26, 1969

Courtesy Harper Collins Publishers / City Lights Publishers

credits

from Allen Ginsberg​’​s The Fall of America: A 50th Anniversary Musical Tribute, released February 5, 2021
Music by Lang Lee
Words: "Death on all Fronts" by Allen Ginsberg
Translation into Korean by Mokin Kim

Lang Lee: Vocal
Hyejy Lee: Cello

Recorded by Hakju Chun at Mushroom Studio, Seoul, Korea
Mixed by Debong Lee

Reading by Allen Ginsberg, ca 1971 Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries, Ginsberg Collection. Special thanks, Barry Miles

Mastering - Scott Petito

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about

Allen Ginsberg New York, New York

Renowned poet, world traveler, spiritual seeker, founding member of a major literary movement, champion of human and civil rights, photographer and songwriter, political gadfly, teacher and co-founder of a poetics school. Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) defied simple classification.

Ginsberg parlayed his fame and network of connections into a modestly successful career in music.
... more

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