Matt DeMello

The third and fourth volumes of Matt DeMello's ancillary yet captivating 'Jennfer's Appendix' series, charmingly titled 'A Sidewalker’s Sweet Revenge' delivers a portrait of the young artist in lost years spent orbiting the legendary SideWalk Cafe in Alphabet City during the 2010s. Wikipedia alone can tell you the venue's mythology stretches from Beck and Regina Spektor to the anti-folk underground, radical open-mic culture, and countless musicians who passed through its doors before the venue’s closing in 2019.

But for many artists and for years longer than Wikipedia can tell you, the SideWalk’s Monday-night open mic served as one of New York’s last truly unpredictable communal music spaces: equal parts neighborhood gathering, artistic proving ground, emotional support group, variety show, nervous breakdown, and ongoing social experiment.

DeMello arrived there less as an official anti-folk insider than as another wandering participant in the chaos — sometimes performer, sometimes drunk audience member, sometimes both simultaneously. But the venue nevertheless became essential to the evolution of records like 2014’s 'There’s No Place Like Nowhere' and the early Appendix material, helping sharpen the emotional directness, humor, looseness, and communal spirit that would eventually define the broader discography.

Following the closure of nearby institutions like the Bowery Poetry Club and the fragmentation of New York’s DIY landscape after Occupy Wall Street, the SideWalk increasingly felt like one of the last spaces in the city where radically different artistic worlds still collided naturally. On any given Monday night, the room could contain aspiring pop singers, noise musicians, jazz obsessives, speed freaks, theater kids, folk traditionalists, and artists who seemed to invent entirely new genres in real time. Often, the strangest people made the most emotionally unforgettable art.

This collection traces DeMello’s evolution through four EP-length sequences recorded during various SideWalk-era performances between 2013 and 2017. The first disc focuses primarily on solo performances, while the second captures two increasingly ambitious full-band incarnations: the jazz-oriented Matt DeMello Band during the 2015 Jennifer’s Appendix Vol. 1 release show, and the far more intoxicated and politically anxious Roslin Administration lineup assembled for DeMello’s 30th birthday performance on January 28th, 2017 — coincidentally the same weekend Donald Trump entered office.

The recordings themselves are imperfect, unstable, occasionally chaotic, and deeply alive in exactly the way the SideWalk itself often was. This collection is dedicated to the sound engineers, performers, regulars, open-mic survivors, and wandering musical lifers who helped transform a tiny corner of East 6th Street into one of the great accidental American music institutions of its era.

And if you stayed late enough, things occasionally became even stranger. Sometimes that meant watching Ben Krieger perform all of Pink Floyd's 'The Wall' or the soundtrack to 'Transformers: The Movie' alone on acoustic guitar and piano sometime after midnight while half the room debated whether to go home or keep drinking until sunrise.

Dedicated to all the sound technicians and staff that made these recordings possible.