Carnegie Hall

To mark the release of their new Smithsonian Folkways album 1975, No-No Boy presents “Hold Me Lover, Tell Me Lies,” a short film that illuminates overlooked American histories through songwriter Julian Saporiti’s Vietnamese American lens and doctoral studies. Sonically, this new work highlights his process of sampling the sounds of historical artifacts and spaces and transforming them into rhythms. Lyrically, connections are drawn with nuance and detail between the historically marginalized and displaced (Southeast Asian refugees, Native Americans, Japanese internees) and groups encountered on the last No-No Boy tours before shutdown: refugees at the southern border and a small indigenous island village in northern Alaska threatened by climate change. In “Hold Me Lover, Tell Me Lies,” an innovative pastiche of song, sound, documentary, and archival images explode into small moments of humanity.