The Children…
The Children… are Michael Wiener, Jim Coleman and Phil Puleo. They have been making music together for over 15 years. Former Barkmarket bassist John Nowlin and drummer Rock Savage have consistently anchored the rhythm section, with a savagely airtight groove that’s both thunderous and mellifluous, primal and funky, and cellist Kirsten McCord has regularly enriched the band’s sound with her somber, lulling phrasing as a one-woman string section. John Andersen was a founding member and key early collaborator. The inimitable vocalist Shelley Hirsch has been a visceral contrapuntal foil for several live shows. Former Swans guitarist Norman Westberg and clarinetist Johnny Gasper provided invaluable texture to the recording sessions for A Sudden Craving.
This music aches for purity. It’s gently agitated. A raw, prickly balm for the soul. An atmospheric montage of aggrieved ballads, plaintive anthems and jagged rockers that couldn’t possibly exist discretely, the essential pieces of an enveloping tapestry that bleeds into itself, cursed and then transfigured. The Children… have performed their theatrically propulsive live shows at many rock clubs and beyond, infusing churches, galleries, boutiques and theaters with their otherworldly, yet deeply rooted aura, claiming these spaces as their own, leaving only their florid, glyphic trace.
The Children… like to call their music ‘gothic blues ambient’. A Sudden Craving is a distillation of where they’ve been as a collective force in recent years, and a suggestive hint at where they might go together in years to come.
As a vocalist, songwriter, actor, writer, curator and educator, Michael Wiener believes that the spirit of improvisation fuels the most fully-realized, incendiary art. Alongside his longest-running collaboration The Children…, Michael has a new avant-pop collaboration with composer Michael Schumacher and Jose Navas/Merce Cunningham/Stephen Petronio alum Cori Kresge—debuting publicly at Artist’s Space, TriBeCa, NYC, winter ’24. Michael has performed in and produced events at theaters and multidisciplinary venues across NYC and around the country, and, for 20 years, curated, produced and hosted a performance series in residency, first at the Gershwin Hotel, later at Dixon Place. He made a splash as the performative inspiration for the Magnolia Pictures release Hail Satan, among other turns in films receiving strong notices at Sundance, Tribeca, Comic Con and international festivals, including his latest, Stockade, as well as co-starring in Thermae, a psychoanalytic thriller in 22 one-minute episodes on Instagram, and a drug awareness PSA directed by Darren Aronofsky, as part of a campaign that garnered a Clio. He has worked extensively with video and performance artist Liz Magic Laser, and has published cultural criticism, essays and profiles in numerous New York and national magazines, newspapers and blogs. He earned an M.A. during the pandemic at Dartmouth College, channeling medical humanities and diaspora studies curricula into research papers delving into personal histories involving cultural memory, generational trauma, and public health’s intrinsically multi-factorial nature, and its correlation with mental health, including ascreenplay soon to be published by Screen (Play) Press.
https://www.instagram.com/thethermae/
Jim Coleman is an electronic musician and composer and cofounded The Children... with MichaelWiener. Other bands that Coleman has been a member of include Human Impact (on IpecacRecords), Cop Shoot Cop, This Wilderness, filer coleman and Phylr. Jim has composed music for independent feature films, television and streaming services, and theater productions. He has worked with directors such as Hal Hartley, Todd Philips, Beth B and Richard Kern. In the realm of theater and live performance, Jim Coleman has composed musical scores for Glowing (directed by Beth B, to be performed at Silent Green in Berlin, August 2024), 52 Jokers (directed by Beth B, performed in Hamburg at Kampnagel and Pop-Kultur in Berlin), Take My Breath Away (directed by Beth B, premiered at Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival), Soon (directed by Hal Hartley, premiered at the Salzburg Opera Festival), and Shadowland (by John Jesurun, performed at La Mama in NYC).
Phil Puleo is a drummer and multi-instrumentalist who composes his own music. He is best known for his work with Swans, Angels of Light, Cop Shoot Cop, The Children... and That’s far enough. He is also an accomplished watercolor pet portraitist and graphic artist.