The Witzard

Black Velvet Flag in tuxes with maracas (SOURCE: Sheldon Schiffer) When you start a band, you not only don't know how it will turn out, you, also, don't know how or when it will end. Black Velvet Flag (B.V.F.) has had a few revivals of interest over the years, so it's still not really over. I notice it because I see spikes in the downloads of the documentary [The Rise & Fall of Black Velvet Flag] and the music. We are not talking about big spikes, but spikes they are. As an art project over time, the trajectory of the band's rise and fall coincided with the culture's capacity to embrace irony and self-reflection. For a brief two years in the mid-1990’s, the NY music scene and the Indie band industry of its time was thrilled to see a show and let the listener reflect and to laugh at one's self, to ponder the contradictions, and to imagine all the iterations where similar ironic self-reflexive cultural activity was happening. I think a culture gets to tha...