johnhdavis

Preface: I recommend listening to Falling Up by Theo Parrish &b Carl Craig while reading this post. My favorite track from Carl. I love how dry the percussion! This was a set I caught at Slingshot in 2022, an electronic music festival held at a former wholesale fruit warehouse near downtown Durham NC. This repurposed industrial space was an apt venue to see this particular show. Throughout…

An album that’s been listed on the “Upcoming Projects” page of this website for almost a decade is now finished and ready for mastering. At the suggestion of friends who have heard it, I have started a Substack where I will be writing about the historical material addressed in the songs on on the record. The first lengthy article I posted there yesterday is about the title of the record and why I…

It’s always nice when friends come through town and ask you to open for them. I’ll be at Perfect Lovers on April 15th, tomorrow, with Roman Angelos and Scivic Rivers Then I’ll be at the Pinhook in Durham on April 30th opening for LAKE and Joyero After that no shows planned as I’ll be working on finishing a long lost solo album this summer and we are getting a new folk implosion record up and…

Well, it’s been a while….I don’t think we ever did a tour quite this consistent actually. Come on out! There are ticket links to all the dates that still have tickets in the shows and events page of this website – except St Louis, which I can’t find a link for as yet. The room the picture was taken is where we wrote the basic drum and bass hooks for the album, then we went downstairs to Durham…

If you would like to support your local brick and mortar record store great! You will be able to get this there starting in August but for now advance copies are available only on my Bandcamp page and at live shows. Green Red and White Allright! Side B Side A

Today I’m starting a new series of short posts on data I pull from things I’m reading, listening to, or watching online about history and politics. Right now I’m listening to the podcast Millenials Are Killing Capitalism where they interview Michael Hardt, who teaches at Duke here in Durham. Hardt has a new book out on the revolutionary movements of the 1970’s that seeks to challenge the notion…

I’m looking forward to visiting California next weekend to play a few shows backed my pals Eli and Andrew from the band LAKE. Nic Hessler opens the LA show on Saturday, January 13th at Permanent Records Roadhouse. Suver opens the Oakland show on Sunday, January 14th at Thee Stork Club in Oakland. We will be playing most of the songs from our new album Love in the Time of Capital, as well as one…

My new album Love in the Time of Capital is now out in its entirety on the streaming services and on Bandcamp. You can pre-order the vinyl version on Bandcamp here: it should reach you in January. Upcoming shows: November 7th at the Cave in Chapel Hill NC November 9th at Buvez in Athens GA December 9th at Government Center in Pittsburgh, PA January 14th at Thee Stork Club in Oakland, CA

The song “Change” from my new album “Love in the Time of Capital” was released on streaming services today. The album became available for pre-order on Bandcamp today as well. You can use the following link to get to the track on Bandcamp and two streaming platforms you might subscribe to: https://lnkfi.re/jdsoundbite I thought of these two streaming services when I watched an interview with…

Hey Folks, On October 11th, the first single from my new album, Love in the Time of Capital, will come out on streaming services, and the album will become available for pre-order on Bandcamp. The album release date will be Friday, October 27th. There is going to be a vinyl edition on green and bone swirled vinyl, shipping out in January, it is estimated. Subscribers will get the album free,…

There are many impressive creative accomplishments in this series on artists making first rate albums over 40. But no one will ever match what Cecil Taylor did in 1988: put out 11 incredible albums in one year. Now granted, they are all live sets from one festival recorded in Berlin with a collection of leading European improvisers- but still. I bought three of these albums in 1994 or 1995 used…

Korea has been on my mind recently as I was working on a song based on The Blowback Trilogy by Chalmers Johnson, who I have written about before on this blog. As I reread the trilogy looking for bits to use, I decided to try and use a teachable moment Johnson wrote about. He recounted how Bill Clinton once raised ire and eyebrows by playing golf on top of the site of mass graves of some of the…

The viola is a beautiful instrument but not often a surprising one. Not so here. I know very little about this record, but I do know that it explores the viola in ways that are unusual but aesthetically successful and fully developed. It reminds me of textures from electronic music, which it may be influenced by, but it sounds thoroughly acoustic. I wouldn’t want to say it’s experimental because…

The Core Is Getting Soft.19: Good Kit

It’s been a few years since I’ve done a post in this series about music production software. I’ve been more interested in learning to use a few pieces of recording hardware I’ve acquired from Overstayer in LA and studying Persian classical music of late. But – there are still some software tools that catch my ear from time to time. My favorite is from a relatively new software developer named KIT…

Turn Off “The News”.1: Black Power Media on Paul Robeson

I’m starting a new series of posts here to express appreciation for and link to pieces published online by some of my favorite sources of news, information and analysis. The title refers to the difference between these sources and what is conventionally understood as “The News,” ie, mainstream outlets like NPR and the New York Times, CNN or Fox, MSNBC or CBS>NBC<ABC etc., and PBS Newshour as…