ArtistInfo

Dogbowl
Zone Of Blue

Album BE 2015 on 62 TV Records label
Rock (Garage Rock, Psychedelic Rock, Indie Rock)

Includes CD of entire album. All songs (except Love In Vain) written by Dogbowl aka Stephen Tunney (BMI), Lyrics and Music © 2015 Stephen Tunney aka Dogbowl. All songs (except Love In Vain) published by Tunneytunes. (p) 2015 62TV records Dogbowl is a planet of his own, a planet in the form of an eyeball popping out of the eye socket of a beautiful girl with naked breasts and blue hair. Like many French music lovers, I was introduced to the Dogbowl phenomenon through his first domestic release, the commanding “Cigars, Guitars and Topless Bars (will be the death of me)”, recorded live for New York City WFMU radio. Although Dogbowl seems to be a 100 % NYC boy, he spent a lot of time in Paris on account of his wife being French. No wonder he concocted one of his most elaborate studio recordings, The Zeppelin Record (on Lithium) in Europe and collaborated with Michel Cloup (Diabologum). I was lucky enough to catch him live several times after that, either solo, with just his guitar, or sometimes also with backing tracks pre-recorded on CD, or with a band. These gigs usually featured Dogbowl jumping while playing his guitar, sticking his tongue out, cursing his non-cooperative CD player as he delivered his exhilarating songs and a few choice oddball covers (Kiss, Devo, The Frogs…). Too bad I missed his hilarious concert in Brussels entirely sung in French, with computer-translated lyrics. Fortunately, the show was recorded and released as Le chien lunatic. Once I was transported onto Dogbowl's musical planet, I decided to dig through its history and to get hold of his previous releases: the albums he made on Shimmy-Disc, two as Dogbowl & Kramer and four with the Dogbowl band. In time, I learned that Dogbowl published his first songs as a member of King Missile (Dog Fly Religion), especially on the album They (1988), and that he played his first solo shows at CBGB in 1985. Back in the USA early in the 21st century, Dogbowl released two more albums, Fantastic carburetor man, and Songs for Narcisse, the soundtrack of a Jean-Jacques Rousseau play. He also pursued his other creative interests, namely the visual arts, with several international exhibitions of his paintings and drawings, and literature. His first novel, Flan, was published in 1992, and the songs from the novel were released concurrently. The second novel, One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy, came out in 2010. It's the first of a Moon trilogy involving a fourth primary color, a totalitarian state on the far side of the moon, and of course: love! The book has been well received and was translated into French, Russian and Japanese. There even is an option to turn it into a movie! Zone of blue is Dogbowl's first new album in ten years. It's a cause for celebration, if only because it allows him to combine different aspects of his inexhaustible creativity: artwork on the cover and the booklet, inventive and poetical lyrics and, of course, his knack for a peculiar but delightful tune. In geographical terms, a blue zone is an area where people live longer. In France a disc is mandatory to park in a "zone bleue". What to make of this? Maybe just this: listening to Dogbowl's Zone of blue enables you to live longer and, above all, happier! JC Brouchard Welcome to the Zone of Blue! That's what they said to me, long ago when I was an astronaut in space for the first time, piloting my own Lunar Module that I made out of a garbage truck and a refrigerator and lots of stuff I found at the junkyard. Electric guitars, bathtubs, a pool table, a broken toilet, a fish tank, three hundred cameras nailed together. No computers—it was a long time ago and I was a young man, I really wanted to be an astronaut and I did not have the patience to apply to NASA and go through all that paperwork and training and nonsense like that. I really wanted to go up into space right away. So I built one. A Lunar Module in a shed behind my apartment building. It was powered by a lawn mower engine. I siphoned gasoline from my neighbor's cars and stored it away in plastic bags in my kitchen. I was careful not to smoke or use the oven because the fumes were very dangerous. When I finished building my space ship, I pulled it out of the shed, filled the tanks with gasoline, pointed it at the sky and pulled the starting cable on the lawn mower engine. There was a beautiful explosion and I was lifted into the star-filled beyond. I was determined to visit the Moon. Then Saturn. To enter into outer space is not as difficult as leaving it and I was content to float far above the planet Earth in my garbage truck contraption, as if it were a big balloon, a floating bird, an eyeball flying like a comet. Then everything collapsed. My space ship entered into an electro-magnetic vortex, a whirlpool of radioactive particles that sent me and my junk-vehicle spinning into a foggy dimension of endless shades of blue. I landed in a field. The grass was blue. There was a blue fence. The stop sign was blue. There was music in the air—subdued. It too was blue. The earth hung in the blue sky and it was of course blue. “Welcome to the Zone of Blue!” they announced, the mysterious voices beckoned me as I climbed out of my lunar module. Indeed, everything was blue. Ultramarine, cobalt, phathalocynine, indigo, prussian and even turquoise blue. Two women approached me. They were both blue. One was a little bit green, but she was very much in tune with the blue world all around her. What happened next is described in great detail on this collection of songs. I wrote these songs while I was trapped in the Zone of Blue. How long was I there? I don't know, maybe ten years, maybe ten seconds. It has been a long time since I last recorded an album like this, and I think it is that entire time I spent in the Zone of Blue, contemplating blue songs about blue things. If you feel blue after listening to this, or if you look in the mirror and discover a blue version of yourself looking back, then you too will know that you have entered into the Zone of Blue! And make no mistake—the Blue one finds in the Zone of Blue is not at all the blue of sadness, or the blue of “Blues” music. It is not the barely cooked Blue steak nor has it anything to do with Blue Blood aristocracy. It is not the Blue you turn when you can't breath, nor it is the blue your fingers become in the freezing cold. The Zone of Blue is none of those things. The Zone of Blue begins with the hot blue flame on your kitchen stove. It is the blue electric sparks that fly out of the wall when you plug in your guitar amplifier. It is the deep blue spaces between the stars on the Big Dipper and the soft blue that runs along the horizon just before the sunrise as you drive on the empty highway. The Zone of Blue is true. The Zone of Blue is you. And because it was Tintin, and not Neil Armstrong who first walked on the Moon, it was only fitting to have recorded these songs in Brussels, Belgium, with Philippe Decoster producing and arranging and playing along with the fellow astronauts and cosmonauts who played here in the Zone of Blue, François Maquet, Marleen Cappellemans, Chris “Joker” Raes and Rodolphe Coster (guitars on Zone Of Blue) with Stephane Schrevens engineering, recording and mixing at Swimming House Studio. Uwe Teichert mastered the thing at Elektropolis. So welcome to the Zone of Blue! Will you know what to do, in the Zone of Blue? Hold onto your space helmet and make sure your sunglasses are taped to the sides of your head!

Musicians

	Dogbowl voc, g, bvoc, *1959 US liner notes, vocals, guitar, written by, album by
	Philippe Decoster b, voc, g, bass, producer
	Christophe Raes , drums
	François Maquet , guitar
	Marleen Cappelemans , saxophone
	Rodolphe Coster g, p, ep, guitar

Producers

Composers

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