Now that we’re deep in the bizarre nightmare hellscape that is Trump America, Brett Gelman and Cyrus Ghahremani (AKA King Cyrus King) have made it easy to escape to another kind of nightmare hellscape when we need a little relief. Starting today, Gelman’s former podcast Gelmania – which originally debuted on Earwolf in 2011 and wrapped up its run in 2014 – is available on Spotify, Tidal, or as a free download. Gelman and Cyrus split the podcast into four separate comedy albums titled B11816 I, II, III, and IV. Here’s what Gelman told us about his decision to finally make Gelmania available in its entirety:
There is over 15 hours of material here. Material that was all originally for the Gelmania podcast. Back when we were making these as podcasts, my friends Nick Thorburn (from Islands) and Nick Thune (from comedy) both commented that Cyrus and I weren’t making podcasts, we were making albums. Cyrus and I agreed with them. It also took away our desire to make a podcast, and increased our desire to make albums. Both he and I have been trying to find the time to record new stuff, but before we released new material, we wanted to release everything that had been recorded before as its own album. The albums are entitled B11816. As in before November 8, 2016. What’s most important in these being released now is that the albums clearly illustrate that all of the problems we are facing with our new president, many of those problems were here before he took office. Many of these problems have always been here. Just not for “white liberals.†We just woke up to the fact that a lot of things have always been totally fucked up, after those fucked up things started to fuck us up in a more direct way. These recordings are a history of our slumber, and an attempt to wake people up (ourselves included) before the stupid shit that happened happened. We don’t even know if it’s comedy. And I will advise, I would not listen to any of this right before bed.
Head over to the B11816 website to check it out.