dethkaster
I customize all my instruments in one way or another, hopefully in artful and subtle ways, but there are always those extreme cases…
MUSINGS
B3ND3R: We Were the Young Americans
“You have to lose that fake British accent.” Stephen Bender had a penchant for calling out any kind of pretension. It was 1995 and he…
tascam 234 4-track
Now that my final 4-track effort statik 3 has been uploaded I want to pay homage to the cassette 4-track recorder that liberated the…
Stone’s Throw: Bromances vs. Blood Brothers
Before there were light-hearted Hollywood ‘bromances’ there was the much more serious bond of ‘blood brothers.’ A blood brother…
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…
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 […]
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 […]
being judged
Ever been in a relationship where you constantly felt like you were being judged? The great thing about 90’s new wave is that it can get all emo and go there! Although the vignette captured in this little tune could very well be about one’s boy/girlfriend it’s actually a scene I witnessed between mother and […]
#ThrowbackThursday: New Waves
Whether you’re 15 or 50, New Wave is always about adolescence. Adolescence in its most raw, awkward, and optimistic state. New Wave is also a moving target (otherwise it wouldn’t be new). It’s the transitional moment before a band goes ‘pop,’ the shiny day before you graduate from high school, college, your job… and the […]
Seoul Report: Musicians as Global Curators
Although the independent music scene in Seoul is relatively new, it seems to be proliferating into new creative forms that we have yet to imagine. Like what my architect alter-ego discusses in his book Convergent Flux, similarly in music there is no organic progression that parallels the North American development of blues to jazz to […]
tired of strawberry leaves
And as Wept fell apart as all bands do, this song became a metaphor for distance – for that mad and meditative commute between two vastly different…
going dry
Many failed attempts at writing a ‘dry’ song on guitar and voice revealed my bad technique. So I turned my back on the gilded god of reverb, bowed and gazed at my shoes like any…
the blind piano tuner
jack sprinkle was a talented, blind piano technician that for years would tune our family’s small upright and make it sound like a grand. one day i played him thelonious monk’s ‘straight no chaser’ and asked him to help me get that thick smashing of chords while keeping the clarity of the high solo runs. […]
Backwards and Forwards
My architect alter-ego shared an interesting story with me recently: Usually during the holidays he receives bajillions of effusive cards from colleagues claiming how amazing the last year was and how the next year will be even better. This year the cards were a mere handful, literally a 10th of what usually arrives. Most sneaking […]