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The Dead Beat Scrolls

The Incomprehensible Teachings of Harvey Christ Redeemer

by Reverend Norm, Reverend Anna Montana, Reverend Joalian, and Reverend Randy Peters

240 pages + 1 CD

7.5" X 9"

ISBN 0-9733499-5-6

quality paperback with flaps

includes 100s of illustrations & comics + sermons & a hymnal + an audio CD

$24

humour - religion - fiction

Brought to you by the creators of the Harvey Christ Radio Hour : a live weekly radio show produced by a collective and heard every tuesday night 11pm to midnight on CKUT 90.3FM in Montréal since October 2000. The show is loosely inspired by gospel radio formats and features storytelling and sermons, hymns played live in studio, baptisms, exorcisms, barn burning, etc. Harvey Christians satirize dogmatic beliefs—whether religious, political or pop cultural—and seek to mix the serious with the bizarre as an antidote to mainstream radio and religion. The group have also self-published illustrated stories, bandes-dessinées and mini-CDs, while the show has been rebroadcast on CiTR FM Vancouver and Radio 90 Banff.

READ REVIEW of Travelling Roadshow performance of July 27, 2005 at the Winnipeg Fringe Festival in Manitoba, as written by The Phantom Fringer.

to view full comic, click image

DISCLAIMER (audio version)
The Church of Harvey Christ Redeemer is a non-denominational, denominational, Christian, non-Christian, violent pacifist militant Catholic Protestant Satanic Buddhist sect religion cult based on the lost, esoteric and largely incomprehensible teachings of Harvey Christ.
We cannot deny the religious bases of our culture, just as we cannot deny our noses (unless we have NO NOSE), nor can we despise them as they are as essential a part of us as we are of our noses. (You can find your nose by making your left eye look to the right or your right eye look left. This method may also be used to discover your inner child or to frighten your enemies).
But just as a nose can be redefined through the expensive chiselling of bone and sinew and flesh and goo, so may our largely Judeo-Christian baggage be redefined into something happy and useful through the teachings of Harvey Christ.

"Harvey Christ's paradoxical expression of both reverence and rebellion, low budget mystique wrapped in the baroque imagery of Catholicism, and a general bohemian respect for the absurd mirrored perfectly a time when all were living in 4-bedroom apartments with 12-foot ceilings whilst scrounging for milk money."

--Rufus Wainwright

author photo: chester rhoder

Reverend Joalian once studied philosophy and currently studies composition at McGill University. She has a BFA in Jazz Studies from Concordia University. She has also sung and played fiddle in numerous Montréal bands over the past 15 years, including the Snitches, Molasses, Dante’s Flaming Uterus, and the Royal Mountain Jamboree. She currently plays magical folk music with Jordi Rosen and Friends, righteous bluegrass with Honorable John and is the lead singer and ukuleleist of a folk-pop ensemble called the Special Interest Group. She is an avid consumer of comic books, and has self-published her own mini-comics. She has written articles for the Montreal Mirror and Farang Magazine. Last but not least, Joellen has been an enthusiastic oddball on the air at CKUT 90.3 FM since 1990.

Reverend Norm grew up in McCreary, Manitoba. He participated in church as an altar boy for many years, providing him with the only sure venue where he could wear a dress and play with smoke and fire on a stage. As a student in Winnipeg he discovered music, art, sex, self respect, booze, spin the bottle, punks, new-wavers, eye-liner, alternative living and moderation. Jan is a predominantly visual artist presently based in Montréal.

He graduated from the University of Manitoba School of Art, completing his last year as a visiting student at Concordia University in Montréal in 1995. Jan began making weird noises and exploring radio theatre at College Universitaire de St Boniface's student radio CTHC, and has embraced his inner foley artist and screamin' preacher for the past four years on the Harvey Christ Radio Hour.

He also created "noise compositions" for ORF Kunstradio in Vienna, is a Founding member of the satirical gypsy-punk band Dante's Flaming Uterus. He began his Harvey Christian career as a later addition to the band "Harvey Christ and Friends" and has since attended pretty much every mass and radio show.

Reverend Randy Peters was born into a congregation of reactionary Mennonites in Portage la Prairie, Manitoba in 1967. A congregation who preached of the fires of Hell and the End of Time that were soming Soon! Randy's family was kicked out of this church for their liberal beliefs, or for Randy's coming-on to his Sunday school bible study partner. The events are unclear but they ended up in the local Seventh Day Adventist church, worshipping on sundays to avoid the SDA's who worshipped on Saturdays.

Since then, Randy has been awarded several degrees incuding a Doctorate of Divinity from a now defunct University of Belize.

Reverend Anna Montana gave her first sermon in the Church of Harvey Christ on February 25, 2000, on the subject of groundhogs. Little did she know what vast secrets would be uncovered. She was born and raised unbaptized in Vancouver, BC, though her family has default Lutheran roots on both sides. Her father's family can even lay claim to an ancester who was the sidekick of Martin Luther.

One tangent of her BA was religious studies. Other than that, she spends far too much time reading about heretical sects persecuted by the medieval Catholic Church, modern-day apocalyptic cults, and the plague.

As for her non-HYC activities, she is a sound and radio artist with a penchant for vaudeville, songs in A minor, and pirate radio. She has presented installation and performance works incorporating low-watt FM transmission in Vancouver, Winnipeg, Toronto, and Montréal, as well as at the Third Coast Audio Festival in Chicago, PS 122 in New York, Ars Electronica 2002, the Akademie der Kunste and Bootlab Berlin, Digitales in Brussels, and various other bunker-like venues in central Europe.

Rev. Anna Montana has produced numerous original radio works for Kunstradio, Austria, as well as for campus/community radio stations across Canada, Brave New Waves on CBC2, and for national public radio in Austria, Denmark and Mexico. She holds a Masters in Media Studies from Concordia University, Montréal.