Fictional Name
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, United States | Established. Jan 01, 2019
Music
Press
Eleven performers rocked the library on November 11, in the now annual tradition known as 11Fest. The festival and the date are inspired by the library’s Studio 11, whose name was inspired by our address (11 W. Church St.) and by the movie Spinal Tap (“Turn it up to eleven!”). To really bring home the theme, the evening is arranged with the acts going from quiet to loud, with the final act blowing the books off the shelves by turning their amps all the way up. The band with that honor this year was Controller, who surely did bring the volume, as well as fantastic musicianship. The other stellar performers included: Arati Shah-Yukich, Amber Peirce, Jillian Dolan, Carys Chase-Mayoral & Ashlyn Leary, Cloud Dweller, Seth Witcher, McGarnagle, Quin Jaye, Pretty Lousy, Trickery!, Fictional Name, and RA!D. Every single one of them was fantastic and it was so kind of them to donate their time to support the library.
So a very loud thank you to everyone who performed, and to everyone who came to the pay-what-you-can event. Nearly $1,000 was raised in support of the studio, ensuring that we’ll keep the amps turned up for years to come! - BAPL
Discography
Lane Hall (expected, 2022)
Photos
Bio
FICTIONAL NAME is a five-piece original indie rock band from Bethlehem, PA. The indie stands for indecisive: rock and roll, grunge, folk-punk, post-punk, lazy country punk, 80s, 90s, 2000s and more (or less)!
A purveyor of a DIY aesthetic and beneficiary of classic kismet, FN formed by JOSH, SAM, & TOM, who met at the Bethlehem Area Public Library's free community recording studio and basement jam space, STUDIO 11. Recent additions include BRYAN (guitar) and CARYS (vocals). They have added more sonic depth and skill, along with names that have the letter 'Y' preceded by the letter 'R'. They all aim to release a FN debut record in 2022, recorded by the amazingly talented GLENN of CAVERNLANDS.
TOGETHER, along with many musicians and local community members and artists, they've also helped curate the annual 11FEST concert at BAPL, held each year on November 11, featuring 11 bands, each going from 1 to 11 on the volume knob. The FN sound runs from a solid 6 to ear tingling 9.
FICTIONAL NAME's songs are about regret, insomnia, making questionable life choices, depression, getting older, depression about getting older, (a)political rage, heartbreak, unwanted pregnancy and/or runaway dogs, inadequate responses to situations, imagining if Johnny Cash's personal life was a serial killer, emotional and physical ailments, survival, some perspectives on working for a trillion dollar company, just feeling weird all the time, and love. Sometimes they contain a ray of hope if you listen closely and squint at ’em in just the right light. We like to call our genre “lazy country punk” but it’s probably just rock and/or roll in its various modes – just as fond of noisy feedback and loud distortion as acoustic quiet fingerpicking. We like ragged screaming and sometimes we try to sing harmonies. CARYS is helping us achieve that. We like Joni Mitchell and Neil Young and X and a lot of under-appreciated indie rock bands from Montreal, circa the early 2000s, like Tricot Machine, Malajube, the Unicorns. TOM is Canadian. He was once told he sounds like Bob Dylan and that was nice. SAM, the drummer, is in his 20s. He claims to remember crying the night Kurt Cobain died, but he would have been six months old and the math doesn’t add up. Probably he was just crying because he was a baby, but maybe he was an unusually hip baby. TOM is in his 30s. JOSH is in his 40s. We'll aim to add some more players in each successive decade and eventually start jamming with ghosts from previous centuries. As we said, we met in the basement studio of the public library. If there's no ghosts there already, we'll become some.
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