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this is played on a set of hanging gongs i built from found flattened car metal sewn together with fishing line to resemble the shape of the continental u.s.a.
this is a new project involving compositions for found objects and homemade instruments. it is me, steff barrow, christian brady, sean peoples, and brit powell. this is an excerpt from a performance last month. instrumentation for this section includes two metal pipe-o-phones, a zither, a vaguely kalimba-like instrument built from broken street sweeper brush 'bristles', pot lid gongs, bells, and a very loose one-headed bass drum. we were performing as 'fantasy apple pipe machine'. recorded by steve sanford. also playing were sejayno, courtney brown, and sonic circus. what a fun show!
if you haven't seen us lately, the cutest puppy in the world is now a thrash dance band.
i am playing in a balinese gamelan ensemble called gamelan mitra kusuma. here we are performing a tune called 'selat segara' at the indonesian embassy in december. more recordings from that night are online at the internet archive.
here is the first piece i played at the fantastic voyagers festival in pittsburgh oct.20. great 2-day fest of solo performances curated by mike tamburo. amazing sets by keenan lawler, michael johnsen, nick schillace, anup pradhan, among many others.
the cutest puppy in the world just played a quick run of east coast shows. here\'s the recording from baltimore last monday (august 13).
i built a zither.
while i was on tour recently, i stopped by the grafton peace pagoda in grafton new york. it's a buddhist shrine out in the middle of the woods. an amazing nun named jun-san lives there. she's walked across the u.s. multiple times chanting for peace. she offered me tea and dinner and a place to sleep having no idea at all who i was. this is a recording of her and the other nun who was staying there, kyoko-san, performing their evening ritual of drumming and chanting.
a new piece on electric guitar called "it's not that far, it's not that cold, it's not that heavy", recorded the other night live by steve sanford. (title granted by the walk home afterwards.) also playing at this show were owl xounds, ryan jewell, and eric carbonara - they were not messing around.
excerpt from an improvisation with prepared guitar and feedback i recorded a few nights ago.
a few weeks ago the cutest puppy in the world played at a 703noise show at george mason u. right in the middle of our set sirens and flashing white lights started going off. nearly everyone had cleared out due to the 'fire emergency' before i realized it wasn't just part of our set. this is the first half, pre-fire drill. some pretty great commentary on the way out at the end. thanks to davis white of rdk for recording.
here's some trance music for you. mailed off this afternoon for consideration for the furthernoise/freesound 'appropriate re-appropriations' compilation, the guidelines of which stipulate you must incorporate at least one sample from freesound (and upload one of your own for each you use). so, it's some layered acoustic guitar plus several field recordings of bells at japanese temples courtesy of freesound user MShades (1, 2, 3, 4). great sites for sound, both of these.
the other day we had a show at my house. whelp (rebecca mills and tristana fiscella, both of the caution curves) played a couple of beautiful pieces and kindly agreed to let me podcast one.
cutest puppy jam from a recent practice.
solo acoustic cover of sonic youth's 'protect me you', from a june 17 show at brown's in dc.
field recording from a downpour-produced mud pit with more frogs than you've ever seen, one of whom i mic'ed real close. recorded at cove campground, gore, va, the night of june 2.
a couple of weeks ago i took part in this event called the 'can we sleep in your barn tonight mystery tour'. it was organized and led by karin bolender, who is an artist and writer living in weyers cave, virginia. a group of mostly musicians set out for a few days on foot through the quasi-rural landscape of the shenandoah valley with a couple of donkeys and a couple of goats in tow. we jammed out in a barn-turned-chapel-turned-nothing, in a funky octagonal barn, and finally in a giant cave. in the cave, each of us took a 'room' and orchestrated what was to happen in that room. this is a recording from my room, called 'the rose garden'. the recording is obviously seriously lacking in terms of its ability to replicate the amazing spatial energy and acoustics, but it is at least in stereo.... my instructions to everyone were first to listen silently to the space, then to slowly begin to hear a sympathetic tone, to begin singing this tone to yrself and then gradually audibly but never so loudly that yr own voice was the loudest thing you heard. (more on the tour here and here. some great photos here and here.)
a remix of an ffffs song i'm working on. you can hear the original here ('i can hear summer coming').
slide gtr.
:: 2006.04.11 ::
excerpt from a bass clarinet improvisation i recorded in february.
:: 2006.04.05 ::
improvised electric gtr (w/ live sampling) plus new found-object metal chimes.
:: 2006.03.27 ::
famous last words: 'feel free to podcast it.'
:: 2006.03.20 ::
an excerpt from an improvisation i recorded at home last week. all acoustic guitar, with live sampling, just one track. pretty mellow, to say the least. in other words, have patience, this one is not priced to sell. (simone weil, by way of an outstanding essay in the new harper's: "the authentic and pure values - truth, beauty, and goodness - in the activity of a human being are the result of one and the same act, a certain application of the full attention to the object.... absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.") maybe what i'm saying is you need prayer-like focus to make it through this one....
:: 2006.03.13 ::
last month the cutest puppy in the world (me + bryan rhodes) was invited to provide live, improvised accompaniment to experimental films by dc filmmakers chris lynn, heather levy, jay rees, and others. the films brought out our more atmospheric side, i think. (we're planning continued collaboration with these great people, as most everyone agreed the films and the sounds complemented and augmented one another nicely..) anyway here is a few minutes from that set. should be a video podcast i guess. next time....
:: 2006.03.07 ::
early version of a piece made entirely of samples from a recent winter camping trip to smarts mtn in new hampshire (and guitar recorded the next day in the inter-zone b/w woods and all the rest). headphones strongly encouraged to mitigate the muddiness (everything recorded to mini-disc w/ relatively crappy mic in less-than-ideal conditions, must-keep-recorder-close-to-heart-so-batteries-don't-freeze-must-keep-fingers-from-falling-off conditions........)
(human again. sense of self as distinct from world happily crumbles as the earth offers itself to you, opens as it is always open, and you offer yrself open yrself lose yrself sink into crunching earth breathing sky fading light warming friends creeping cold enveloping silence.)
