some things I've been up to

Sorry there hasn't been much activity over here on the blog lately. I've been keeping busy with a variety of things, including (in no particular order):

1. Doing paid copyediting on an academic manuscript on the topic of conceptions of time in African-American science fiction (Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, Jewelle Gomez). As some of you might guess, this is a pretty satisfying gig for me.

2. Designing the "visual identity" of "Fugue State," the two-day festival of "expansive music" that Chris M. and I are putting on this summer. I need to write more about that here, later, and it should probably have its own dedicated webpage over at the Rebis page, but suffice it to say that if you like drones and other experimental music, and you're here in Chicago or can get here, you might want to reserve that last weekend in June. Current draft of the poster lives here, if you want to see what I'm up to in that regard.

3. My band, Number None, has been playing a couple of sets around town lately, including one tonight at the Flower Shop(pe), along with Emeralds, Druids of Huge, Bongripper, Bloodyminded, and my old friends the Birds of Delay (now is a good time to once again link to this ridiculous photo).

4. Selling a bunch of shit on eBay, including early printings of six Philip K. Dick books, if anyone's interested in that...

5. Watching my way through the stockpiled third season of Lost, and trying to decide if I want to commit to watching the show through to 2010

6. Researching literary agents who might be interested in the more-or-less completed novel. The dreaded Guide to Literary Agents lists about a dozen people who are openly interested in "experimental" work, so that might be a good thing.

7. Photos, photos. Taking lots of walks with the camera, shooting dozens of shots and then posting the best to Flickr in a pretty steady five-a-day pattern. The fifty photos that the computer tells me are the best are here.

8. Eat, sleep, read, try to remember to pay bills occasionally

Labels: number_none, personal

Friday, May 25, 2007
8:16 AM
0 comments

business / busy-ness

I've got shit coming at me from all directions this week, most centrally a pile of grading that's about the size of an unabridged dictionary, so the quietude that's afflicted this blog since I finished the big canon-making project will likely persist for another week or so. After that things will start wrapping up and I'll have a little more room to breathe.

If you're desperate for content, you could take a look over at my photos on Flickr: the nice weather of late has pushed me out of the house and into the city, and I've been making a lot of use of my camera to take pictures of, well, mostly trash and assorted disrepair. But if you like those kinds of things, there's lots of new pictures to look at. Try the Notebook on Cities for a taste.

Also, any readers of this blog who are in Chicago, or who can get here before 9 pm tonight, might want to come by to see me perform at the Lakeshore Theatre tonight with my band, Number None: we'll be debuting a new, as-yet-untitled piece. We're in the middle slot: Ben Vida will be opening, and Mike Tamburo will be wrapping the night up.

Labels: meta, number_none, personal

Wednesday, April 25, 2007
9:51 AM
0 comments

where i've been and what i've been up to

It's been a pretty busy couple of weeks around here: between teaching, personal commitments, work on the novel draft, and a cluster of Number None shows, my free time has pretty much been maxed out, no time to create much in the way of substantial new blog content.

I haven't even mentioned, for instance, that the first draft of the "Novel of Adequacy," now titled Meanwhile, is completed. If you want to see how complicated it got by the end, you can check out this crazy interactive diagram I made with IBM's fun little data visualization website, Many Eyes. (Make sure to zoom in by clicking-and-dragging or the thing will just look like an undifferentiated dense heap of datapoints.)

Parts of the novel are still pretty messed up (for instance, there's one cluster of characters who haven't yet been integrated into the main mass) but it's getting close to the point where it is maybe ready to be put out there for comments. I'd like to get all the chapters through a second draft first, but in any case, if you're interested in reading some of it, just ask.

The other thing I didn't manage to get around to mentioning recently is that Number None got a nice mention in Time Out: Chicago, as part of an article on the Chicago "drone scene." It has a photo and everything (I'm the guy with his head cocked in the back row). It's nice to finally be mainstream, I guess.

I've also been quietly posting more book reviews over at LibraryThing, I'll post a bunch of those here tomorrow.

Labels: novel_of_adequacy, number_none, personal, writing

Tuesday, March 20, 2007
2:56 PM
0 comments

where i've been and what i've been up to

Been keeping a pretty low profile over here on the blog; hope nobody was too disappointed. I've been busy lately with band stuff: playing a few shows, recording a lot, making notes on archival recordings from the past year, and finalizing a few upcoming releases (one on Paha Porvari and one on Apostasy).

Also have managed to happily host a few travelers. First up was D. Bauler, aka Medroxy Progesterone Acetate, the King of Iowan Noise, who we collaborated with (via post) on last year's Damp and Damned cassette-only release. Hot on his heels was the theremin-weilding Gwyneth Merner, aka The Opera Glove Sinks In The Sea, who contributed a wonderful track of tenebrous drone and insect-song to our two-disc Lead Into Gold comp from earlier this year.

During each of these visits we had some time for a little sit-down, where we could play for a bit and produce some collaborative recordings, both of which yielded some intriguing material which may find a home someplace (or it may sit in the archives alongside the super-secret Number None / Skaters jams).

What else?: writing, teaching, reading novels, reading comics, the usual. Enjoying new(est) issues of Cabinet and Kramer's Ergot. Changed my e-mail address and my phone number. Stay tuned.

Labels: number_none, personal

Tuesday, November 07, 2006
1:40 PM
0 comments

talking about sounds

Stylus Magazine just published a long interview that Scott McKeating did with Chris and I (as Number None), largely focusing on our album Urmerica, released around this time last year.

Those of you who are curious can follow the link, but I was pretty pleased with this particular exchange, in which I manage to semi-seriously use the word "aura":

Scott: Are you believers that a recorded sound holds elements of meaning beyond the actual sound? For example, would an abattoir field recording contain elements of absolute horror that weren’t audible?

JB: When we were on tour this March I asked Carlo Steegen (of Hardline Elephants) what was the last piece of music he heard that scared him. He told me about Bob Ostertag's recording of a boy digging a grave for his father, who has been killed by the El Salvadorian National Guard; digging sounds, crying, and a buzzing fly. This recording is available as a free download on Ostertag's site, by the way, if you want to freak yourself out. Even further along these lines we have John Duncan's notorious recording of himself having sex with a corpse. The contexts here are quite horrific—they generate negative energy that seems adequately described by the term 'aura.' As for how much of that "aura" can be transferred to the listener via the process of recording, that's anybody's guess. I think most people who engage in the practice of magic would say that, yes, recording technology is going to capture some of that aura and will in fact replicate it in playback. This can also be thought about using Bruno Latour's theory of the 'anthropological matrix,' which describes the way in which indigenous people tend to conceptualise their tools and their interpersonal relationships and their natural world as part of a hybridised, organically bound web. I think it's possible to talk about recording technology as something that works as a part of that web. In short, I believe that a sound has a power and a recorded sound in playback maintains that power."

Lots more where that came from.

Labels: number_none

Friday, July 21, 2006
8:53 AM
3 comments

rebis news

As some of readers of this blog probably know, in my "spare time" I help to run an experimental record label, Rebis. We just released a new batch of stuff, so I thought I'd plug it here...

First up we have Autumn Engines, a collection of lo-fi netherworld drones from Hasan Gaylani and Ben Jones, aka the mysterious Jazzfinger. With help from Ben Wilkinson and Sarah Sullivan, these guys have been summoning up hypnotic smolder-patterns for a decade now, documented mostly on a stream of European CD-Rs, cassette- and vinyl-only releases. If you've been unable to track these things down, or turned off by the esoteric formats, Autumn Engines (their debut stateside CD release) should work as a great introduction to a band that Aquarius Records calls "totally breathtaking" and that Wire journalist David Keenan calls "one of the best free / avant / drone / primitive groups in the UK." $14 postpaid... and if you want a free taste, check out the tasty MP3 of their track "Dreams Cast Shadows," available on our sounds page.

In other exciting news, we're also taking this summer as an opportunity to launch our new Rebis imprint, Whitened Sepulchre, dedicated to reissuing and preserving key recordings of the New Electronic Sublime. We're kicking things off with a reissue of "...Ascends the Sky", an out-of-print gem from cosmic improv masters My Cat Is An Alien. Originally released in 2001 as CD-R, "...Ascends the Sky" presages the vast sonic nebulae now familiar to MCIAA fans, but those same fans may be surprised by the way the disc moves through more warm or tuneful regions, evoking surprising associations like Spiderland-era Slint, or Tim Buckley's Lorca or Starsailor albums. $14 postpaid.

And finally, a few copies of Lichfields arrived in the mail from Norway recently... Lichfields is a cassette-only Number None release out on Gold Soundz in a limited edition of 50. The Gold Soundz folks are already sold out, so we're willing to part with two or three out of our stash. The Volcanic Tongue folks (who also have a few copies) say Lichfields' three tracks are "beautifully static forms that morph into whatever kind of star-cluster you wanna dip into it." Sounds good to us. $10; and when they go, they're gone. Order through this page...

Labels: number_none

Thursday, July 20, 2006
12:30 PM
0 comments

what i've been doing

There haven't been too many substantive posts on this blog lately, sorry about that. A lot of my online time has been spent doing research for an attempt to write the so-called "novel of adequacy" that I first started talking about back in October. At the time I was feeling pretty down about my ability to write such a thing, but in March, coming back from the East Coast microtour, something suddenly "clicked" in my head and I thought "I know how to do this."

We'll see if my intial confidence is borne out by the actual thing itself, once it comes into the world. I will say that the writing process is going remarkably speedily: I've been working on it for only about a month and I've finished six chapters, or what will be probably about a quarter of the book.

Anybody who wants to read it as a work-in-progress, don't be afraid to get in touch.

In other news, Chris and I have been working on finishing the new Number None release: the fifth "official" full-legth, to be entitled Edison | Orison. I'm not exactly sure when it will be released (we're thinking of shopping it around to other labels instead of self-producing it) but it's good to think of the thing as almost done. We're working on track order this week, and when we're done I'll post a listing: hopefully the track titles will seem appropriately provocative and cryptic.

Labels: novel_of_adequacy, number_none, personal, writing

Thursday, May 18, 2006
4:47 PM
0 comments

self-promotional IV

Oh, yeah, almost forgot to mention: Chicago-area readers of this blog might want to know that Number None (my band) will be playing tonight at the Empty Bottle. We'll be premiering a new piece entitled "Bilgewater and Nitrogen."

Actual content returning soon.

Labels: number_none, personal

Wednesday, May 03, 2006
5:39 PM
0 comments

self-promotional III

Still more output.

The experimental poetry journal Zafusy has just published my short poem "Cirrus."

"Cemetery Textures" photo-set is now up to a cool 40 photos.

An old Number None track (from our 2004 CD-R Ways of Sleepers, Ways of Wakers), is now available as a freebie from the Rebis MP3 page, or direct from this link: "I Want My Body Back."

In other news: semester almost over; I'm fifty-odd papers away from summer vacation.

Labels: number_none, personal

Friday, April 28, 2006
12:19 PM
2 comments

ur-music

Back from the East Coast tour, alive and well. Most of our sets went fine, although I accidentally took one down into a wretched oubliette from which there was no suitable escape: a personal low point. But the rest of the time we ran around and had fun, reconnecting with collaborators and co-conspirators far and wide (including some I didn't expect to see, such as the Skaters, who appear to be expanding a ramshackle tour into something approaching a semi-permanent way of life).

About half the bills we played on were starting to swell to the point where they functioned almost as micro-festivals: the smallest one included four bands, with the biggest bill including somewhere around... eight? Although this made for some long evenings, it also enabled me to see a ton of great sets, including guitar-drum improv freakouts from Vampire Belt and Lambsbread; spastic drool-rock from Hardline Elephants; a teeming, chittering theremin-and-iBook drone from The Opera Glove Sinks in the Sea; drifting/pulsing Casio strangeness from Eva Van Deuren (aka Orphan Fairytales) and NYC outfit Watersports; and a couple of truly killer slabs of noise from our touring partners Birds of Delay, who just keep getting better and better, somehow. I think these guys are really at a turning point, on the cusp of supreme greatness.

I picked up a huge ton of CDs on the road, and will maybe blog some MP3s once I begin to digest the pile a little bit.

Oh, also, while we were gone, this Number None interview appeared on the Foxy Digitalis site: check it out if you want to see a picture of me wearing a funny hat.

Labels: number_none, personal

Wednesday, March 29, 2006
1:58 PM
0 comments

tour details

Next week, Number None (my band) will head out to the Great American Northeast to join Birds of Delay and Son of Earth for a handful of shows. Those of you in that part of the world who are into drone music / noise music / general weirdness should definitely come check it out.

The info, right now, looks like this:

Saturday, March 25 - Northampton, MA (afternoon show at Gallery TK)

Sunday, March 26 - Providence, RI (AS220)

Monday, March 27 - NYC (Eat Records, Brooklyn)

There's likely to also be a Friday, March 24th show, possibly in Brattleboro, VT or Amherst, MA but that date is not currently confirmed.

Labels: number_none, personal

Friday, March 17, 2006
10:46 AM
0 comments

east coast micro-tour

Exact details are still being fixed, but the Number None / Son of Earth / Birds of Delay tour is beginning to come together.

It is looking like Number None will be joining the other two bands for the following four (4) dates:

Fri, Mar 24 - Boston, MA
Sat, Mar 25 - Northampton, MA
Sun, Mar 26 - Providence, RI
Mon, Mar 27 - NYC, NY

There's also a Fairly Good Possibility that I'll be performing a solo set (as Noah Opponent) with these guys in Philly, at Big Jar Books, on Monday, Mar. 20. Hope to see some of you out there in the country...

Labels: number_none, personal

Wednesday, February 08, 2006
10:02 AM
0 comments

rebis news

It is looking increasingly likely that Number None will be doing a micro-tour of a few (3-4) US cities this March, joining up with drone minimalists Son of Earth and UK noise lads Birds of Delay (on their first US tour). Will we be coming to your town? Stay tuned.

Here's a somewhat dubious photo of yours truly with the Birds chaps, from this summer, when we were over in the UK and touring briefly with them:

You can tell what kind of time I'm having, I think. (Hint: drunk)

The forthcoming Rebis comp, Lead Into Gold, features tracks from both the Birds and Son of Earth, hopefully we'll get it out to the plant soon so we can have copies for sale on the tour.

Also: a very kind review of the Damp and Damned tape-collaboration (of which we are now sold out).

Labels: number_none, personal

Monday, January 23, 2006
10:10 PM
0 comments

kraken / archon

Forgive the lack of recent posting: it's the final week of the semester and everything's crushed together and overlapped, as usual. So, quickly then, here's the news:

1. You can see an annotated photo of what I ate for Thanksgiving over at Flickr

2. Chicago-area readers may want to note that my band, Number None, will be playing this Saturday, Dec. 3rd, at Hotti Biscotti (3545 W. Fullerton). We'll be opening for Zelienople, and the show is free.

3. Rebis is now accepting pre-orders for Damp and Damned, a cassette-only release from Belgium's Sloow Tapes label. The two pieces on this tape are the result of a postal collaboration between Number None and Medroxy Progestone Acetate, aka the hermetic D. Bauler. DB took two tracks from Nervous Climates, (one of which, "Polar Kraken," you can now download as an MP3) and submitted them to a sequence of mystery re-recording techniques, returning them to us in a radically reworked form. We then dissected and reconstructed his reworkings until we had this 60-minute tape. The tapes come with a hand-cut "kraken" insert which is pretty cool. I'm not sure exactly how many of these we'll be getting, but to say that this run is going to be "limited" is, uh, probably accurate.

Labels: number_none

Thursday, December 01, 2005
3:07 PM
0 comments

clawing at the low end of the frequency band

This Sunday [November 27], my band, Number None, will be attempting to ritually convert Chicago's airspace into a single resonating antiprism through the use of technology provided by Loyola University's radio station WLUW. Thanks to Philip von Zweck and his fine program "Something Else" (which features "Sound Art, Electronic, Experimental, Improvised and Avant-Garde Music, Field Recordings, Soundscapes, [and] things beyond description") we'll be able to begin this process somewhere shortly after 11 pm Central Time.

Chicago residents can hear us on call number 88.7, but out-of-range listeners hoping to darkle their own zip code can tune in to a live webcast (available through the "listen live" link on the station's homepage). To best witness the effect we suggest you point the speakers out the window and towards the waning moon. Thank you.

Labels: number_none

Thursday, November 24, 2005
5:10 PM
0 comments

other perspectives

A little sniffing around yesterday revealed that Josh Corey and Jack Kimball have also weighed in thoughtfully on the New Yorker Ashbery profile. All of us are bothered by it, but all of us center our critiques on different paragraphs.

Somewhere else, jack-of-all-trades Seth Tisue has posted some photos of the Two Million Tongues Festival, including two of Number None [one, two].

Labels: number_none, poetry_commentary

Thursday, November 10, 2005
11:28 AM
0 comments

two million tongues

The Two Million Tongues festival of psychedelic and experimental music is approaching this week at the Empty Bottle. A solid-looking line-up (Thursday night's is especially well-tailored to my tastes):

Thursday November 3rd:
Tony Conrad
Hototogisu
Miminokoto
Mountains

Friday November 4th:
Jackie-O Motherfucker
Gary Higgins
Pearls & Brass
Jack Rose

Saturday November 5th:
Whitehouse
Josephine Foster
Andrew Ortman
Haptic

Sunday November 6th:
Charlie Nothing
Michael Chapman
No Neck Blues Band
Ed Askew

Each night will feature a bunch of side-stage performances too, including one by Number None (my band): Chicago-area Raccoon readers may want to stop by on Friday night and say "hello."

Labels: number_none

Tuesday, November 01, 2005
12:12 PM
0 comments

strategies of accretion I

Sorry about the lack of regular posting over the past week; I've been busy with a guest in town and also finishing up a Number None submission for the Belgian Sloow Tapes cassette-only label. (More on that in a future post.)

In my "spare time" I've been thinking a lot about Phoebe Washburn, a maker of massive assemblages who I learned about in an issue of Frieze that CJO recently picked up. Frieze writer James Trainor describes Washburn's process as being a "calculated accretion" of everyday detritus, interesting in and of itself, but the part that really grabbed me is the way that she recycles previous works into new ones.

In his article, Trainor writes:

"Washburn is not just a salvager but a recycler of her own work: in 2003 the filleted cardboard from Between Sweet and Low was dismantled, packed up and transported to Rice University in Texas and refolded like cake batter into an even more ambitious four-ton work, True, False, and Slightly Better, which in turn was demolished and carted off to Grinnell College and reconfigured as a massive shingled wall of debris titled Heavy Has Debt, where the dead weight of exhausted, screw-riddled cardboard finally gave up the ghost."

I'm not a sculptor, but this sort of process feels familiar to me in terms of my music-making. In Number None, practically everything we improvise gets recorded, and before the archival recordings finally get "retired" I spend a lot of time cutting them up into samples or making loops from them, which then get worked into new pieces, which then might get cut up into new samples or loops, which might then be transferred to audiotape and fed live into a performance (which then, of course, gets recorded and added to the archives to be cut up once again). Any piece that Number None might perform live is represents a certain process of digestion and redigestion: it would be interesting to go through and chart the genealogy of bit of sonic cud that we're mashing together, although at this point some of these genealogies are so tangled and gnarly as to render this process functionally impossible.

Since one thing that's been hugely on my mind this fall is the Big Question of What To Write Next, I've also been musing on whether the strategies of monumental accretion and redigestion couldn't be put to use as a textual strategy: I think I'll save that post, however, for next time. In the meantime, here's a short interview with Washburn for y'all to take a look at, with some nice photos.

Labels: art, creative_process, number_none

Thursday, October 27, 2005
10:09 AM
0 comments

tonight!

Special note to Chicago-area Raccoon readers:

Expect a manifestation of bad drone magic tonight at Chicago's famed Empty Bottle, as Number None (my band) opens for the semi-mythical White/Lichens (Jeremy Lemos from White/Light in collaboration with Rob AA Lowe aka Lichens).

Also on this bill will be The Zoo Wheel, the solo project of Liz Payne (from Thrill Jockey minimalists Town and Country) and Maths Balance Volumes, a "black-clad teenage cult" from Minnesota. And, oh yeah, lest I forget, it's free. Stuff starts around 9:30.

The Zoo Wheel, White/Light, and Lichens will all be contributing material to Lead Into Gold, a compendium of alchemical confusion which should be available from Rebis sometime around the dead heart of winter.

Labels: number_none, personal

Monday, October 10, 2005
1:22 PM
0 comments

their mountains so lofty, their treetops so tall

Over the last year, some of the music I've enjoyed hearing the most is weird, delicate folk from Finland (visit the Fonal website for a taste, they've got loads of MP3s if you sniff around a bit). So when I learned that Clay Ruby (of Madison psych-folk outfit Davenport) had organized a US tour for some of the new crop of the Finnish psychedelic scene, I was pretty excited.

The show was Monday night, and it featured Lau Nau (who have put out a release on Chicago's own Locust label), Kuupuu, and Jan Anderzén (ringleader of Kemialliset Ystävät), who was playing with Spencer and James of the Skaters.

I ended up putting most of these people up at the Blood Dorm that night, and the Skaters stayed with me until this morning. It was nice to spend some downtime with them, just lying around with them watching obscuro 80s horror (Xtro, New York Ripper), but the real highlight of the visit was the Skaters / Number None jam that happened yesterday. We got some recordings of the session; maybe some of it will come to light one day.

Labels: number_none, personal

Wednesday, September 21, 2005
12:39 PM
0 comments

validation(s)

Well, I'm safe and sound back in the US, and almost re-accustomed to Central Time.

In my ego-driven web-surfing this morning I was pleased to notice that someone did a thoughtful and generous write-up of the Number None / Jazzfinger / Espers show we played in Nottingham.

In other validation news, the new Wire contains a positive write-up of our new release, Urmerica, and also one of the Time and Relative Dimensions in Space compilation. If anyone's curious, I've posted the full text of these reviews on the product pages (Urmerica; Time and Relative Dimensions in Space; scroll down).

And finally, I picked up the new Chicago Reader and learned that the Number None / Keenan Lawler / Mike Tamburo show coming up on Tuesday is a Critic's Choice this week. (We'll also be playing shows this week in Madison (Wed 17) and Bloomington (Fri 19); if there are any Raccoon / sleepingjpb readers out in either of those cities, stop by and say 'hello.')

Labels: number_none, personal

Friday, August 12, 2005
8:42 AM
0 comments

All is still going well with the Number None / Jazzfinger Mobile Action Unit—better than I had hoped, even. We're not selling a ton of merchandise but each show has been increasingly well-attended (playing with Espers last night definitely helped) and there's always people who want to come up afterwards and talk, which I take as a sign that there's at least a segment of these crowds that are enjoying what we're doing.

Last night I saw someone sending a text message on their phone at the show; I looked over their shoulder and read the message "Just watching Jazzfinger ... amazing." Score!

In Leeds we were joined onstage by Phil Legard of Xenis Emputae Travelling Band, which may have been the highlight performance of the tour for me. He has a homemade theremin which is all Day-Glo and organic-looking, super-cool; he also has the Line 6 Modular Delay pedal, which I covet most egregiously.

There seem to be no tensions among the main group of travellers, which is great, considering all the other ways that it could go, this business of five people in the same van all week. And we're not too rushed—each morning we've been able to lounge around wherever we've stayed, getting showers, eating good vegetarian food and watching DVDs (I just got done watching Bill Hicks).

Chris and I are both attempting to work UK slang and phraseology into our daily speech, which always sounds hilariously wrong coming out of my mouth somehow.

Taking tons of photos, although people expecting a normal roll of holiday snaps will be disappointed; I'm mostly doing the normal sorts of texture-collecting that I like to do, taking close-ups of crumbling walls and toilet graffiti.

Two more tour performances: London tonight and then a festival on Saturday, where we'll be performing with Jazzfinger as a noise quintet. Can't wait!

Labels: number_none, personal

Friday, August 05, 2005
5:50 AM
0 comments

hello glasgow

First leg of the trip is completed safely: I flew into Machester yesterday. After a breakfast of the finest British cuisine (black pudding is not as bad as you'd think, although I avoided the stewed-looking tomato) we hopped on a bus and rode five hours up to Glasgow. It was a nice ride through country hills dotted with sheep and goats.

Observations on UK freeways: very few SUVs, even fewer signs of any sort of truck-line transport. The "big rig" culture of US freeways appears not to exist here in any way at all.

Glasgow, so far, is beautiful, and our hosts, David and Heather of Taurpis Tula / Volcanic Tongue, have been extremely kind and gracious. Their apartment is full of psychedelic records, religious icons, and Dr. Who memorabilia: I'd have a hard time imagining a place where I could be more comfortable.

First show = tomorrow night = Number None, Jazzfinger, Taurpis Tula. I'll be the one wearing the boa which will likely be drenched in flop-sweat.

Labels: number_none, personal

Sunday, July 31, 2005
6:34 AM
0 comments

So now, after a week of whirlwind activity (in which, among other things, I wrote a chapbook of 36 poems in 24 hours) I'm off to England, to join up with the other half of the Number None Mobile Unit for our micro-tour of the UK. UK readers of this blog, if there are any, consider checking out the tour dates on the Rebis page if you think you want to come out and see some ecstatic drone.

So anyway, although I might attempt some blog posts from the road, I think it's likely that updates here will be minimal until after August 11th, which is when I'll be returning home. Hope you're all well~

Labels: meta, number_none, personal

Friday, July 29, 2005
7:52 AM
0 comments

upcoming rebis performances

Just a reminder to Chicago-area Friends of Rebis: there will be two shows from guitar dronesters White/Light this week: tonight's free show at the Empty Bottle, with Odawas and Zelienople; and then tomorrow night's performance at the 3030 / Elastic Revolution space, where they will be performing a special "quiet" set with Rob Lowe of Lichens and a few extra guests. Fursaxa and Dreamweapon will be rounding out the 3030 bill.

Bring a little extra cash if you want to pick up a copy of White/Light's debut CD...

My own band, Number None, will be promoting our new release Urmerica with Chicago performances at the Blackspot Gallery on Tuesday, August 16th (with Keenan Lawler and Mike Tamburo)—and we'll be playing a free show in October at the Empty Bottle.

This kind of information can always be easily found by looking at the sidebar on the Rebis news page, which is now a little calendar of upcoming events.

Labels: number_none, personal

Monday, July 11, 2005
12:54 PM
0 comments

1) Last night's show was fantastic. East Coast readers, I implore you to make it to the NYC Boredoms show happening in another couple of days.

2) Today's the last day to bid on a bunch of CDs I'm selling through eBay.

3) Most excitingly: the new Number None album, Urmerica, is back from the pressing plant and now available for sale. You can download an MP3, "Suggestion For A New National Anthem," from the Rebis sounds page.

Labels: number_none, personal

Sunday, May 22, 2005
12:19 PM
0 comments

Chicago-area Raccoon readers may want to come out into the cold to check out either or both of the following events:

1. Tomorrow (Sat 18) Chris Miller and I, performing as Number None, will be debuting a new drone piece, "Pacific Metals," at Hotti Biscotti, 3545 West Fullerton in Logan Square. We'll be performing with improvisational vocalist db Pedersen and Madison-area psychedelic collective Davenport.

2. On January 9th, 2005, I'll be doing a reading as part of the Sunday night Myopic Poetry Series. I plan to read some Imaginary Year entries, as well as some more experimental writing, maybe even some poems. Save the date!

Labels: number_none, personal, writing

Friday, December 17, 2004
2:25 PM
0 comments

The new Number None record is now available.

We had a release party on Saturday night (thanks to Kristina D and David W for hosting). When we were thinking about the party, Chris and I decided we'd bring the MiniDisc to record the voices of the partygoers, as raw material for a future piece. In order to try to generate a wider variety of material, we devised a series of vocal prompts. I put them together into a deck of cards that the partygoers could draw from (because, well, it had almost been a year since I made my last deck of cards). A full list of the prompts that I contributed to the deck can be found here.

I'm thinking about doing a minor redesign to this site. Stay tuned.

Labels: number_none

Monday, May 05, 2003
11:36 AM
0 comments

Chris and I have been spending a lot of time lately poring over the recordings we made over the past year, trying to make selections for the second Number None CD-R release, due sometime in April. There's a lot of interesting material stored up, and I think the new disc will stand as a pretty dramatic leap forward for us as a band.

During this process of sorting and reassessing (and cleaning stuff off the hard drive) I've also been looking over some noise experiments that I've done on my own, one-offs which are essentially "finished" and can't really be introduced into the Number None collaborative process. I think there's about enough material there to make up a solo disc, so I'll probably finish that up in April as well. This disc will include "In The Lake Of Dreams," the completed version of my dream recordings project. The disc should also include some of my recent experiments with low-input systems, experiments where I introduce a single sample or test-tone into a sonic contraption that feeds back on itself. It's a variation on the no-input experiments of Toshimaru Nakamura or Rafael Toral.

Labels: number_none, personal

Tuesday, March 11, 2003
1:06 PM
0 comments

Hey, how about an MP3?

Number None hasn't gotten together recently, because my other half, Chris M., is currently traveling in Japan. I've been filling the time by creating little one-man sonic oddments. Here's a sampling: a sad and ragged bit I call "The Seacoast of Despair." (1.44 MB) Recorded direct to hard drive.

I'll keep this MP3 up for one week, and then maybe I'll replace it with a different one.

Labels: number_none, projects

Monday, August 05, 2002
3:11 PM
0 comments

The Number None album is done. We need to put a finishing touch on the packaging and then we'll gift some copies to people. You may already be on the list. More on that later. For now, here's this, from the liner notes to the Mountain Goats' newest album All Hail West Texas:

"Some of us ... imagine the hand of a person behind all this: an ornery little fellow who will have no sound without a second sound to obscure and pollute it, who is deeply mistrusting of singers in general, and who believes that whatever 'signal-to-noise ratio' might mean, it can't be any good unless more value is placed on the latter of the two hyphenated terms. Of course the original signal is never actually anywhere near any recordings anywhere, but you all already knew that. You have been sure of it for quite some time now. You see the proof everywhere. It is the reason you started reading these lines in the first place."

Labels: number_none, personal

Saturday, April 13, 2002
10:54 AM
0 comments

Spent a few days over the weekend hacking out some mockups of cover art for the Number None CD.

It was hard to think of an image that would convey our aesthetic very well. My tendency in design these days is to lean towards the ultra-minimal: super-clean expanses of white space broken up only with stark, perfect geometric forms. You know, the kind of thing that is easy to do well with Adobe Illustrator.

And that would be a decent fit if Chris and I were making minimal, clean laptop music. But we're not.

Which is not to say that we don't use technology. Chris can play some instruments well, but without machines I would have nothing of value to bring to this band. I love using the machines as generative technology: I'll set up a system on the computer, plug a sample into it, and see what emerges. Or I'll "play" the guitar using only the knobs on the effect pedals. But the end result is not clean. The music is dirty—irregular, fecund, low-fidelity. Recorded live to a single microphone which also records the room hiss and traffic noise. The Illustrator look just didn't fit for this project.

But then it occurred to me. The right technology to use for the cover art was the photocopier.

For a long time I've loved photocopiers. (See number 17.) I love the things that are made with them. And it seemed to be fitting to use them for this project: as with the recording technology Chris and I have at our disposal, photocopiers are cheap and lo-fi (the punks knew this first), and, as with the sound manipulation software I use, with photocopiers you can appropriate just about any sort of input, push a few buttons, and be rewarded with often magnificently unpredictable output.

How about links?

Here's a history of Photocopy Art.

Here's some information on Choreography For Copy Machine (Photocopy Cha Cha), a 1991 animated film made entirely from photocopies (I saw it in 1999, and it was wonderful; I wish a Quicktime version existed).

And here's some images from the (somewhat) recent book Fucked Up and Photocopied : Instant Art of the Punk Rock Movement.

Labels: number_none, technology, xerography

Tuesday, April 09, 2002
8:40 PM
0 comments

A Number None CD, of selections from our past year of recorded experiments, is in the works.

That's got me thinking about cover art.

When I think about cover art, I think about ECM, a label which specializes in cerebral jazz and "new music" composition, and has seemingly mastered the art of package design. Never have I fetishized commodities quite as much as I fetishize ECM albums, often by artists who I've never heard of.

Labels: number_none

Sunday, March 31, 2002
12:09 PM
0 comments

This just in:

Holding a vibrator to an acoustic guitar sting creates a sweet array of unholy droning noise. Especially when the vibrator in question is this Hello Kitty vibrator: its plastic head has an irregular topography, which means more ways that it can be productively touched against the guitar.

Speaking of drones, I can't seem to find a good drone music discography on the Web. The FAQ for the DroneOn mailing list has two lists worth examining, one of current practicioners of drone music and one of "ancestors". But because both of these lists stick closely to the rock pantheon, they neglect to mention the many drones created by both composers of "new music" (La Monte Young and Phill Niblock are both conspicuously absent) and electronic musicians (those of you seeking the latter may wish to check out this Needle Drops column).

I am half-tempted to create my own web resource on the topic. I'll put that in the If I Had Limitless Time file.

Further listening: D. Bauler, of The Journal of Speculative Disease, has some "drone sickness" loops available here.

Labels: music, number_none

Saturday, February 09, 2002
6:22 PM
0 comments

Got together and played with Chris last night, as usual for a Tuesday night.

We improvised a fair number of pieces, but few felt satisfying. At some point we shifted into a discussion of what kind of music we'd like to make, and tried to identify why we weren't getting there.

We batted around some questions which are key for my understanding of music in general: is there a way to fruitfully balance experimental music and song? What is the ideal ratio of structured playing to unstructured playing?

We've enjoyed our attempts to play with pure improvisation (experimental / unstructured) and song (non-experimental / structured), but I think that our interest falls most squarely on the sector where experimentalism and structure overlap. This may be why both Chris and I have such a high level of interest in drone music and minimalism — they are musics that are built around structures but which do not rely on the familiar song-based ones.

I don't think we will eliminate the song and improv elements entirely from our playing, but I think we are leaning towards integrating those elements into experimental metastructures.

Further reading: I wonder how this twenty-five hour collective improvisational drone went. We thought about going, but Duluth is not exactly two towns over.

Labels: creative_process, number_none

Wednesday, January 30, 2002
10:41 AM
0 comments

Chris and I have named our inexperienced musical duo "Number None."

We got together and played on Monday and Thursday this week. Both sessions went well. On Monday we focused on playing over background drones generated by the laptop. Thursday we mostly put the laptop away in favor of testing out our new acquisition: a violin (which we purchased in a shady back-room deal, believe it or not).

I felt that Thursday was the more promising session. When we began improvising last year, our improvisations were marred by their meandering nature, their failure to develop interestingly through time. On Thursday, we improvised a handful of songs that seemed to have discrete segments. For the first time, I felt like we could hear when a song needed to change direction, and that we had enough rudimentary versatility to enact those necessary changes.

Here are playlists, in case anyone's all that interested:

Monday
The Reorganization of Work	Octave Cat, thumb piano, laptop loop
The Blooddrinking Ones	Octave Cat, gong, bells, wineglass, voice, acoustic guitar
Feldspar	Octave Cat, drum, laptop loop
Thursday
The Inconveniences of the New York Summer Season	metals, violin, laptop loop, harmonica
Skeletal Inconveniences of the New York Summer Season	metals, violin
A Dead Man	wineglasses, violin
In A Quiet Mood	voice, acoustic guitar, violin
We're the Only Ones Who Admit It	violin, Octave Cat
Bedraggled-Looking Girls	voice, Octave Cat, guitar
Such Images Are Often Playful	bowed acoustic guitar, Octave Cat, laptop

At some point, we may convert some of this material to MP3s and make it available from this site. Stay tuned.

Tonight I'll be going out and seeing Dave Pajo, aka Papa M; one of my favorite bands, Town and Country, will be opening.

Labels: number_none, personal

Friday, January 25, 2002
8:47 PM
0 comments

faking it

It's Tuesday, so tonight Chris and I got together to play music. Still riding high on the success of last week's session, tonight we stretched our wings a little bit, and mostly we fell on our faces. But I still think that we managed to expand the sphere of operations that we're capable of.

Towards the end of the session, we were feeling aimless, so we drew an Oblique Strategy which suggested "try faking it." As a result, we attempted to improvise a folk ballad, giving it the title "Death Be My Bride."

The result was, shall we say, not very convincing, but it was good to at least attempt to create something resembling a traditional song, and it pointed out directions for further exploration, which I think may be the point of the Oblique Strategies.

Labels: amateurism, number_none

Tuesday, January 15, 2002
11:56 PM
0 comments

musical amateur night

Chris and I have been getting together to play more frequently lately, exploring the musical ideas we cooked up in our old Musical Amateur Night sessions. Tonight we improvised six songs. They aren't named yet, but the instruments we used were as follows:

1: 2 wineglasses & the Octave Cat
2: 4 wineglasses & the Octave Cat
3: gong & welding metal
4: taped percussion, turntable, tin whistle, 2 wineglasses & hand bells
5: plastic recorder & thumb piano
6: drum & acoustic guitar

It was fun to play with Chris, as always. I ended up feeling like we are no longer quite as amateur as we once were; like we are coming closer to producing the kind of music we enjoy as listeners.

We will name these songs next week, probably using our usual stichomantic methods.

We also need a name for the band, as the novelty of changing names every week has worn off. If you have any old band names saved up, feel free to send them my way.

Labels: amateurism, number_none, personal, projects

Wednesday, January 09, 2002
12:01 AM
0 comments