boss bx-800 mixer
Houses can be haunted but what about musical gear? Could it be that there are ghosts in the circuitry, the after-image of sonic experiments…
statik 2
[1992] My musical mentor from my teenage years, the late George Horan taught me that navigating the elusive difference between…
valentine: there’s no escape from the beat…
“Someone please turn that s*** off!” I could barely stand it. It was the summertime in the early ’90s and there was only one beat on the airwaves. Even if you didn’t listen to the radio you’d hear it spilling out of the car next to you or blaring at the party you just […]
half asleep
Under the collective roof of 1616, my private bedroom was right off the public living room: its door revealed a still-life of the late-night: dreams and insomnia, insecurity and creativity…
promiscuous sax
The soprano sax made me promiscuous. No, not in that sense (or maybe in that sense). What I mean is musically free. After abandoning my alto the masterplan was to switch to B-flat horns (like Coltrane) first with a soprano then a tenor. Carrying around the soprano was too easy: no bigger than a violin […]
16:16 an imaginary intersection
Some of these songs go too deep into ’90’s New Wave territory, but like a rescued cat, I love them anyway. I don’t know if it’s possible to write tunes like this today without being retro, ironic, or both. But back then they were honest New Wave. When Erik Carlson (aka Area C) and I […]
16:16
16:16 is a collaborative EP by area C X jh0st originally released in 1991. It is also a place in time. As a shared address it housed a cadre of…
the art of ambience: volume not decibels
Before there was the 1616 house there was 516. Sandwiched between neighbors (and our forgiving housemates) this is where Erik Carlson (aka AREA C) and I learned the basics of sonic-psychology: That ‘volume’ and actual decibels can be separate aspects of sound. While we didn’t crank it up to fill the space, our tools of […]
the art of portability
“See it’s fine,” Erik Carlson (aka AREA C) stated matter of factly as he punched the side of his small vintage fender amp to stop it from crackling. We had just walked half a mile with our guitars and gear to plug into the flickering street light at our favorite abandoned intersection in downtown Charlottesville… I […]
new wave and reverb: forever together
I’ve gone on about giving up reverb. But like other mind altering substances it’s hard to shake. Even when you’ve sworn off the addiction, the enveloping space sneaks back into your life with a vengeance… NewWave and reverb are too intertwined: Sometimes I wonder – did the invention of digital reverb give birth to an entire generation of […]
Fretting Less
The fretless electric bass is a transcendently expressive instrument all to itself. It’s also a bastard instrument: born from the electric guitar (not the double bass) in the 1930’s it was only later ‘defretted’ for the first time in 1961 by Rolling Stone legend Bill Wyman who merely yanked the frets out on his existing […]
40 Days: Songs and Suicide
Maybe the new year isn’t the best time to breach the topic of suicide. Then again if Robin Williams’s tragic death taught us something it’s that…