* 2021 stock * The bastard son of William S. Burroughs, Antonin Artaud and Crispin Glover. Hilarious, awful, heartbreaking and brutally honest, his Stand Up Tragedy is some of the best shit I’ve heard in a decade” - Lydia Lunch. Bryan Lewis Saunders is a multi-media artist, poet, videographer, and performance artist from Tennessee mostly known for his disturbing monologues and somniloquies, a master of an outlandish universe of his spoken word. In 2006 he started his own label, Stand-Up Tragedy Records, and since 2007 has been performing in Contemporary Art Museums, Media Arts Schools, and at music festivals mainly in Western Europe.
“Near Death Experience” is a 2010 recording, originally produced by Erratum as an LP release, that takes his twisted world and jams it into a 74-minute mindfuck. He channels his disturbance into his creativity, using visual art and musical performance as alternative ways to deal with recurring demons and mental health issues, conveying a message about the power of addiction. “For hundreds of years, artists have been putting themselves into representations of the world around them. I am doing the exact opposite. I put the world around me into representations of myself as I find this more true…” - B.L. Saunders. “Near Death Experience” is an extreme sound poetry collaboration with music from Joachim Montessuis, Marcelo Aguirre, Christopher Fleeger, Michael Peck, John Duncan, Spastic Dementia, Kaontrol Kontraos, Murmurists, and Tracy Lee Summers, from harsh noise to heavy drone, an impressive and immersive piece of contemporary art.