Late-life John Fahey drone territory. Yep.
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Late-life John Fahey drone territory. Yep.

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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While staying with a dear friend at CalArts during my LA visit, I saw seminal Krautrock band, Faust, perform. The show straddled the boundary between fluxus-inspired performance art (over-the-top chainsaw "painting," the use of drills and a cement mixer) and music. It was a fun show to surrender to and my oh my, that drumming!
The CalArts orchestra opened for them with some interesting student compositions, my favorite of which involved an electric microtonal guitar!!!
My friend Amy is such a wonderful painter. I love them, and this one especially.
Wood is a big part of my life in the mountains, especially now that winter is coming on. I split and stack wood with my neighbor, Jimmy, and sometimes we come across wonderful things. Poplar wood can take on vivid colors (he thinks it's maybe from minerals picked up from the soil), and this is the best we've found.
Jimmy and his wife adopted me from the get-go, and as a result I have had many opportunities to participate in local mountain culture. For example, the second week I lived there I went on a bear hunt with Jimmy and his friends - and their fifteen hound dogs (walkers, blue ticks, plots). We got up at 5AM and hiked up to the top of a ridge and watched the fog pooling pink around the mountains below. We passed an echoey mica mine that had to be abandoned when the miners struck water as we looked for fresh bear sign in the leaves. Bear hunters keep their hounds on leashes until they find a fresh track and then release them (to be found later via radio collars). If hounds are pursuing an animal downhill, the hunters know they are following a deer, but if the dog is chasing uphill, it's a bear, and you better be ready. Luckily, no one shot a bear that day, because I don't think I would have been able to keep myself from yelling, "No! Stop!" and offending some of the most sincere and knowledgeable nature lovers out there. Bear hunting is just one example of an activity I would have previously judged unfairly, but so long as it is done sustainably, so long as the meat is eaten, and as long as the dogs are lovingly cared-for, I think it's just fine.
As I mentioned previously, I moved from San Francisco a year ago to a rural Appalachian community that I've had ties to for over a decade. I'm visiting friends in SF/LA for the next 10 days, which is giving me some valuable distance from my little gravel road. I journaled for awhile when I first moved there, but as the experience rooted itself more and more dearly to my heart I became afraid of historicizing it too soon. That's where music-making has been useful, because everything I have composed there is infused with my home, but in a safe, largely abstract way. Stay tuned for some posts about my life in the mountains written from this brief, distanced perspective.
And yes, that is my puppy. She is now a little over a year old and is one of my dearest companions.

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Record shopping at Ooga Booga at Kadist #kadist (Taken with Instagram at Kadist San Francisco)
San Francisco: Best city in the world!!!
I saw Mt. Eerie a few weeks ago, and it was great. More than anything, though, I'm impressed with Phil Elverum's ability to combine his art, music, and writing into original and compelling objects. I bought Dawn, which he describes thusly:
Dawn by Phil Elverum (book+CD)
What is this? “Winter Journal”? CD? Pictures? What? Here for sale is a potentially boring, potentially illuminating journal from a winter spent alone in a remote Norwegian cabin in 2002/2003, along with a CD of the songs written during that time and some pictures and drawings. The idea is that the journal writing is the “raw source material” that the songs were later distilled from. Reading it in journal-form perhaps recreates the slow pace of life and the swirl of thoughts that allowed the birth of such songs. Also: jokes, observations on cold nature, literature, surrealism, “home”, perception, etc. You might find it interesting.
It is a pretty nice object too: a hardcover book bound in synthetic birch wood. It looks like the piece of wood it is. (Buenaventura Press)
I found the painfully honest/vulnerable journal absolutely addictive and can only hope that more musicians/artists will combine their disciplines in such lovely (and affordable!) objects.
I kinda can't believe I haven't already shared this Julius Hemphill track off his 1972 album Dogon A.D. It's been a favorite for several years now, and I hope some of y'all enjoy it too!
Here's a track off David Lang's album Elevated. Upon initially hearing this piece, I had to listen to it about 20 more times to try to wrap my head around it (it has since edged it's way up to my 2nd most-played song, right after Michael Jackson's P.Y.T.). This track seems to hover and shift without resolution, and yet it is very soothing at the same time. It's one of those tracks that makes me wish I knew something (anything!) about music theory.
In case you haven't noticed, I haven't posted for awhile. I've been living up a gravel road without internet and have been too busy making music, gardening, and teaching highschool art to post. Good excuse, right? I'm visiting the grid for a week and will hopefully be scheduling some more posts before heading back to the sticks. To start, here is a piece from one of my favorite contemporary visual artists, Tauba Auerbach. In the past she has designed some album covers, but to my knowledge, this is her first piece that actually produces sound. LOVE LOVE LOVE IT!

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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Happy Holidays!
You could call George Stavis one of the fathers of melodic banjo. Although I'm not really a fan of what melodic banjo has generally turned into, I think Stavis' album Labyrinths has got it going on. Jazz, Indian Classical, Fahey - it's all here. Incidentally, it's also got one of the most ridiculous album covers of all time, which is not a bad thing.
"Other Minds (based in San Francisco) welcomes you to radiOM[ray-dee-om].org — the website that brings you the sounds of revelationary new music and the voices of the revelationists themselves.
Our offerings include interviews with some of the most influential composers of our time including Lou Harrison, Brian Eno, John Cage, Laurie Anderson, György Ligeti, and Anthony Braxton.
We also offer concerts, sound poetry performances, lectures and documentaries in classical music, jazz, experimental music and other forms.
The material you will find here is gleaned from thousands of hours of audio recordings from KPFA-FM radio in Berkeley (1949-1995), and concerts and talks produced by Other Minds in San Francisco (1993-2005).
We urge you to search our site often as new programs are added each month. Use of this site is free, but for unlimited access to the material registration is required."
Like Folkstreams, the Digital Library of Appalachia is another incredible resource for all things rural. With free downloads of field recordings from the archives of different Appalachian universities, you can't go wrong. Might I suggest starting with the lined-out hymns?
Honestly, I'm posting this track mostly for the album cover. It's got everything good: a banjo, mountains, a handmade quilt and a dog. This is the only solo banjo album that I know of that John Fahey's Takoma Records released (speak up if you know of more!). I think the banjo is one of those instruments that can still have a lot more teased out of it.

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
What a gift. An entire album devoted to Indonesian guitar in its many different forms. And this track is so beautiful and surprising. While the names Alan Lomax or Moses Asch may first come to mind when you think of Folkways recordings, you can get recordings from all over the world from this branch of the Smithsonian. I highly recommend checking out their website, where you can browse recordings by country, instrument, language, etc, etc, etc. Some recordings are so rare that they will make a CD for you to order. There's also plenty of oddball field recordings, like sounds from different scientific disciplines, etc, etc, etc. You get the idea. Check it out!!
With her scores of original tunings, songs that overflow into multiple keys and her spectacularly unique vocal ornamentation and tone, Joni Mitchell is one of my favorite experimental artists. Yes, experimental.