July 19-20
Driving. All about driving. We put in a long day of driving thru some gorgeous Montana mountain country, the rushing streams and the every-present Burlington Northern railway line on our side. We reached the lovely town of Bozeman, Montana, where we once again scored a nice hotel room on priceline.com for a third of the advertised rate of $150. Crashed out and woke up refreshed, took an early morning jacuzzi and swim in the hotel pool and split for the local food coop where we filled up with healthy snacks for the long trip ahead.

After a lovely first few hours of driving along the Yellowstone river (spotted a Bald Eagle perched on a dead tree limb), we began the looooooong drive across the prairie lands of North Dakota. Stopped in Bismarck, ND for dinner at a ‘mexican’ cantina-style restaurant, during which a sudden hail storm accompanied by a freight train roaring right by the place drove everyone off the patio but us (we found the experience rather exhilarating…city folk, ya know). With the change to central time, the sky stayed light well into 10pm. took this video from the back of the van to commemorate it (with John Cage’s ‘Two Pieces & Two Pieces for Piano):

As we approached Fargo and our 11th hour in the van, we began the search for a motel only to find every one of them booked up. WTF?! Turns out large wind farms were being put up all over the area and the rooms were filled with construction workers. We finally found a dirtbag motel at a Flying J near Fargo and crashed hard. the next morning, we ventured into Fargo to say we’d been there, found a cafe with some wireless and then promptly got the hell out (as far as i’m concerned, the next ice age won’t come soon enough to scrape the place clean) and headed for our much anticipated gig in Minneapolis with George Cartwright (of Curlew).

July 18 Seattle WA
Been looking forward to this show playing with our friends in Pink Mountain and Eyes. Shortly after our arrival in Seattle, we met with the gang for a nice meal at Thai Tom in the U district and then proceeded to get lost trying to find the venue. Relying on GPS, we ended up in front of a nice house in a residential neighborhood. Turns out the address was NW 65th St not N 65th st, just a 1/2 mile down the same street, but amongst a small strip of buildings down the hill from the Phinney district. May I digress a moment? This GPS thing is wonderful, but you tend to lose your sense of place as it seems you are taking orders from a dispatcher who knows your every movement and change in direction and politely tells you what to do (our GPS, named Matilda speaks with an educated English accent). And when she melts down (like she did when we were on Bainbridge Island), you resort to asking the nice policeman for directions. I feel a little naked without an actual paper maps. AAA here we come.

Back to the point…So the venue was punk-squat-like and the nice creatures living there sort of wandered around the place very used to the hustle bustle of touring band load in and text messaging, moving about, etc.

We played a good set. I must say we are feeling like a band more than a collaboration and the sets are changing and developing new things. Of late shorter pieces. this night we did three: a scritchy-scratchy one, a mayhem loud one with much theatrics, screaming from Val and David (David’s extended theater moment including a discussion of lactating and a desire for breast milk ice cream) and a high-pitch whistley thing that finished with a Branca-like tension filled ‘big ending.’

Seattle Scream, Seattle, WA 7.18.09

Eyes rocked out a quick set and Pink Mountain kicked it all into high gear. Sadly, their set was cut short just as they were really grooving. The PA wasn’t very good and the vocalist for PM apparently wasn’t having a very good time and put and end to the evening early.

Headed back to the cool little bar at the end of the street called The Dray (why don’t we have any neat little corner pubs like this in Oakland???) with John Shiurba, listened to the bartenders consolidated life history and were soon joined by Gino Robair and Justin and Aaron from Eyes. Prehistoric Horse had decided to start the drive east immediately rather than deal with taking a ferry out to our hosts, The Snapp’s house and inevitably getting a late start. This strategy paid off handsomely as we put in a solid four hour drive east to the outskirts of Spokane. the next two days are going to be all about driving…

July 15 Eugene, OR
The gig in Eugene was at the Jazz Station, a small publicly-funded art space on the main pedestrian drag. Our good friend Jeff Kaiser helped set up the show and he and local artist Sabrina Siegel opened the evening with a wild set, Sabrina using her voice and controlled-feedback-guitar-played -with-rocks (yes rocks) effectively against Jeff’s trumpet/voice and Max MSP sonic manipulations.

Our set was a crazy one, the first long piece going to some very interesting places and contained a entertaining David dialog – complete with a french accent – about ‘the stinky man’ (you take him home, you put him in your bed, you sleep with him). Our second, short piece took things further and came completely off the hook when one of the audience members hurled himself onto the floor and writhed around screaming with his t-shirt wrapped around his head. Seriously – audio evidence coming soon…

July 17 Portland, OR
After a sweaty, hot van stop and go traffic van ride from Seattle, we barely had time for the required Powell’s Books stop before heading over to our gig at a Portland New Music Society fundraiser. The venue was an upstairs room in an old brick artist loft warehouse. Which like many spaces like this excelled at retaining the days heat well into the evening.

We performed first and played a very good set with the usual longer first piece, but followed up with several shorter pieces as well for a forty minute set. Each of us had a great time performing and there were some very cool moments, but the vibe when we finished up felt really strange. Sort of like we played at a funeral. A couple of the musicians in the next act stopped by and complemented us, but for the most part the remainder of the 25 people there were rather stone-faced. Dunno, maybe the chaos we delivered wasn’t what they were expecting or up their alley. And the chaos: it included a water gargling bit by David and Valerie, an intense second piece with valerie singing out of a dictionary and of course, David’s spoken theater moment which revolved around the idea and statement that “I could have been a Rabbi’ It was very cool. Afterwards we headed down to Backspace to catch the last few songs by our Oakland friends in Pink Mountain – which was some crazy rocknroll mayhem for sure…

Random Notes:

Big Blue is our Tour van. He rocks. He has a cassette player and we have a stash of them to play. Of course, we have a iPods and CDs with one of those cassette converter dealies, but there is something about cassettes that rock. One is the vintage of the music and the other is the physicality of the format, you have to handle it in some way and that is cool. of course they take up some space, but hey – we can just listen and discard and buy more at thrift stores i suppose.

(The first two gigs of the tour were with the original PH quartet of David, Valerie, LM and John Hanes)

July 13 Albany, CA
The first at the Ivy room was sort of a chaotic mini-hoot, with guests Mr Dorgon and Laurie Amat. Different combinations of people collaborated to make some crazy sounds. Prehistoric Horse did play an actual set at some point and it was fairly chaotic.

July 14 Oakland, CA
The second gig @ Flux 53 space in Oakland was more in a format and style we originally coalesced around with a good sounding room (in this case a blackbox theater) to allow for more dynamics and acoustic/electric interaction. We played exactly twenty-one minutes and the set had plenty of dynamics and David’s theater as well. Afterwards, a member of the opening act turned down the invitation to do an encore group collaboration (something to do with a bruised and/or overinflated ego), but that was just as well as we needed to pack our things, get in the van and drive as far as we could that evening on the way to our next gig in Eugene, OR.

Suki O’Kane and I have launched yet another new project: Delicate & Destructive. We played at the Sacramento ‘In the Flow’ Jazz festival this past Saturday. 105 degrees in Sacto that day and driving to the afternoon gig in a AC car sans AC, I thought I might melt. The festival featured ‘jazz’ (and the majority of the audience) in a main air conditioned fancy venue and ‘noise/improv’ in a warm, funky record store full of vinyl – quite perfect, really. We went for a completely different feel than any of our previous improvisations and sculpted a sonic build that went from, well, delicate to destructive.

Check out more of Michael Zelner’s pics from the show.

Prehistoric Horse provokes audiences through spasmodic bursts of snare drum (david grollman), guitar (lucio menegon), cello (valerie kuehne) and occasional unprovoked dramatic outburst. A very intense and dynamic form of improvisational music that sometimes borders on sheer noise and incorporates the absurd. A mashup of Bennink/Nakatani/Frith/Frisell/Bach/Britten/Bi-polar disorder punk rock sounds.
“…spasmodic bursts of clatter and skree via cello, drums, and guitar, typically played in ways that would make conventional music teachers shudder in horror.” (Seattle Stranger)

 

discography:

more vids:
Prehistoric Horse YouTube Channel

…played the Boise Creative And Improvised Music Festival this past weekend. Did one set as Strangelet (with John Hanes on electronics) and another as Prehistoric Horse (a new collaboration with John, LM, drummer David Grollman and cellist Valerie Kuehne). The Horse did a lot of wandering about Boise and had a lot of fun just hanging out. Our intense thirty minute set on saturday night started off an evening of incendiary performances by Emily Hay/Motoko Honda, Colter Frazier/Rob Wallace, Jim McAuley and Kribophoric.

The venue for the festival was The El Korah Shriner Hall (entertainment unto itself with a kick ass grotto-bar, prop room and fully costumed group portraits). Attendance was better than past years (it was free), but slim at times and there was the feeling that most of Boise had no idea or care that this was going on. However, the audience was polite, attentive and given what must have seemed like pretty confusing music to the majority, appreciative.

We attempted some guerilla promotion tactics during an outlandish visit to the 8th street pedestrian, which was mostly met with polite smiles and the occasional offer to stop by the festival. During the promotion blitz, we were approached by a photographer for Boisestyle.com – perhaps attracted by our thrift store furry puppet accessories (that he chose a picture of just me & my monkey over one of myself, the monkey, Valerie and her Wooly Mammoth puppet is baffling).

Boise is a vanilla kind of place. It’s pretty small and it doesn’t take long to walk back and forth across the downtown and we did so several times – not much else to do. We stopped in for pizza and beer at our favorite joint and discovered the salvation of the saturday late-night streetcart shawarma guy (doing our best to safely run the gauntlet of staggering frat-party drunks filling the sidewalk).

All together an odd setting for such music. So how is it we end up back here in this high desert potato town playing crazy-ass improv and experimental music year after year? One: the performers. Many of the same players who made last year a highlight were there and it’s fun to hang out with them. Two: Kris Hartung & Jeff Kaiser . Kris is the guy who has made great efforts to put together the Creative and Improvised Music festival for four years running and Jeff has been responsible for curating and raising the level of talent. Bravo, guys.

…played a cool gig last night at the Temescal Arts Center in Oakland. The trio of myself, Morgan Guberman and Pat Spurgeon (spawn of the Ivy Room Hootenany late night jam) have now officially played two gigs. For this second one we actually had a name, Impish Lizard – quickly pointed out as already taken and then appropriately mangled by the second act’s drummer, Jacob as Fisted Lizard – which I rather like.

The first act was John Shiurba and Gino Robair (purportedly in his birthday suit) rattling out some inspired improv as always.

Fisted Lizard followed and because there have been noise complaints from a neighbor who lives in the fancy new condo across the street, we pulled back a bit on the volume but still managed some punch.

We did three pieces, the middle being the most intense with only one moment where you think, ‘shit this is going nowhere’ at the beginning, but patience prevailed, something caught and didn’t let go for a good long while. To set the vibe, we each had a sheet of paper with Thelonius Monk quotes to guide us – two different ones highlighted for each – which was kinda cool.

Up last was the duo of Ava Mendoza and Jacob Felix Heule. Ava is the coolest guitarist and one of best of this style in the Bay area. I always get to steal some tricks from her (thanks Ava!). Jacob is a monstrously powerful drummer – sort of a Ches Smith on steroids. Together they put in a torrid thirty-five minute set of continuous rock/noise improv that worried not about volume. The cops didn’t show up, so it must have been well received…

This is why the Experimental/Improv Hootenanny rocks. It is also why folks should stay late, because it always gets…nutty. The below example comes courtesy of ‘Lude, the Narcotics addicted Clown.
Michael Z’s photos
Michael Z’s audio (KAP/Myles Boisen, ‘Lude, Lords of Outland, Michaela Peterson)

The idea behind the monthly Experimental/Improv Hootenanny & Social Club is to foster collaboration and community amongst players and fans of improvisational outside music in a cozy place where people can chill, chat, get a decent cocktail – all with no cover..

Each month consists of one featured act and three curated sets with five minute overlaps creating a seamless night of improvised outside music and spontaneous collaboration.

Rules of the road:

All music is improvised.

The feature act can be an existing group or collaboration.

Curated sets are new collaborations or untried solo experiments. Curators either arrange collaborators beforehand or engage musicians in the room to play with.

After the main sets are over, the stage is open to collaborations until 1am. This has been really fun and sometimes pretty crazy. One late set had a DJ, a guy knocking out demented guitar/vocals, a sax and some drums/noise. I was like some 6am Berlin bar scene from ‘Wings of Desire.’

Third Monday’s of the Month at KingTone’s Ivy Room, in Albany, CA.

Check out the recent East Bay Express Article

Sonic evidence courtesy of Michel Zelner/House of Zoka (link takes you to a directory of all the audio):

#1 7/14/08
Brumit/Carnaki, Blue7, Jonathan Segel, John Hanes, Myles Boisen, John Shiurba/Morgan Guberman/Suki O’kane, Allen Whitman, Guberman/Spurgeon/Lightning (Fisted Lizard)

#2 9/15/08
Laurie Amat Sextet, Ross Hammond Quartet (w/ Hanes, Mezzacappa, Greenlief), Mark Growden Quintet

#3 10/27/08
Reid Johnston, Jeff Hobs, Geo, Jonathan Segel, Pluto

#4 11/24/08
KAP/Myles Boisen, ‘Lude, Lords of Outland, Michaela Peterson

#5 2/16/2009
Allen Whitman, Strangelet

#7 4/20/2009
Greyscale, Jet Black Hair People (P. Conheim), O-Type, Suki O’Kane, LM, David Slusser, Jeff Hobbs

#8 5/18/2009
Michaela Petersen (w/ Damon Smith/Weasel Walter), Mark Growden Sextet (w/ Hanes, Mezzacappa, Greenlief, Ross Hammond, LM), Wayne Grim, Salane & Friends

#9 June/15/ 2009
Ross Hammond, Matt Lebovsky, Salane & Friends, The Noodles

This is a republish of an older post. A CD of this project, 73-D is being released on the Swiss Musicians Association label on Sept 13, 2008.

In the Fall of 2006, I traveled to Europe to perform a variety of shows including solo experimental, a duo collaboration with Laurie Amat, and a very interesting week of performances in Bern, Switzerland with my friend Philipp Zuercher and his Fractaloid Project. In Philipp’s words:

Fractaloid 1-9 are 72 hours of live music, composed by Philipp Zuercher. The main issue is the interaction between four musicians and huge virtual structures: a computer program makes a looping device produce “a heap of empty wraps that want to be filled with musical contents”.

The form of those wraps is based on the aesthetics of fractals. Fractals are fragmented geometric shapes that are self-similar and appear in nature, too. The composition was first performed by four musicians, playing nine shifts of 8 hours each at Marks Blond, Bern-Switzerland (September 14th to 17th 2006).

The looping/sequence program Phillipp created called for the performer to record at specific moments, graphically represented on a computer screen from hot to cold colors. Red parts were, ‘must record!’ and blue were, ‘listen only’ with gradations in between. These gradations chopped up the recorded bits and threw them back, sometimes for many minutes at a time, allowing the performer to listen to the progression of things or take a break and get some food and drink! Each composition of sequences lasted around 40 minutes and would then start over, going around and around continuously for 8 hours straight, relentlessly, until the next musician took over.

I have fond memories of performing my three 8 hour shifts in the little MarksBlond.com hut, which has room for approximately 12 people and is situated in a nice upper middle class neighborhood next to an old stone church. I especially remember my last shift, which was from 4am to 12pm on Sunday. Food, energy and inspiration were running low when the church’s bells started pealing – echoing around the previously tranquil neighborhood, calling worshipers with that ancient, deep, cast-metal BONG, BONG, BONG that one only really experiences in Europe. I’d been performing all by myself for many, many hours and was getting mighty punchy, so I decided to incorporate the bells into the recording. I hastily stuck a mic out the door and managed to create some very satisfying musical chaos. At some point after this, I stumbled down the street in a crazed, sleep deprived, low blood sugar state in order to record the bells with my portable recorder, and received some concerned looks from a few of the staid, well dressed residents making their way to the morning service.

ICS is an organization of musician/kooks that form mysterious lodges in order to use a very powerful and prolific composition technique known as the twenty song game.

This week’s Oakland East Bay Express features an in depth cover story about The Immersion Composition Society. Check it out, get inspired and start your own lodge!

As a charter member of New Lodge, formed in 2002 (and sort of morphing into IconoLodge in 2005), it has proven quite prolific.

Just returned from a week of shows with my pals Rob Price and David Grollman. It was a great run culminating with a show at the 3rd annual Boise Experimental Music Festival. I’ll be posting some more mp3s soon and lots of pics. Steady as she goes…

I’ve attended and performed at every BEMF and this one had some really great talent. Here is a quick synopsis…

It was an honor and humbling experience to twice hear acoustic guitarist Jim McAuley. His ability to perform outside music with varied instrumentation, utilizing interesting tunings and a fearless sense of composition were a revelation. Jeff Kaiser and I marveled at Jim’s ability to bring together traditional structures with avant garde techniques and composition. Jim plays melodies, he deconstructs harmonic form and he’s a badass soloist…but above all it was MUSIC. And I tell ya, sometimes these experimental festivals can test just about anyone’s definition.

Other highlights were The Transhumans rockin set, Rob Wallace, Colter Frazier, & Jim Connolly‘s mindblowing saturday night trio improvisation, Tom Baker‘s glass fretboard and fretless guitar tones, Kribophoric, The Choir Boys, and the duo of Emily Hay and Motoko Honda and their excursions of insanity.

I love the sound of old records. Especially ones from the 50’s and 60’s – the golden era of open reel tape recording – often utilizing fewer than 8 tracks. Great musicians made the music (usually all together), great producers coaxed and coerced great performances and brilliant engineers made it sound spectacular – using great rooms, great mics and simple recording paths.

One of those great engineers, Larry Levine has passed away. It was he who invented the Wall of Sound with Phil Spector at the venerable Gold Star Studios in Los Angeles on such hits as The Ronettes, Be My Little Baby and the Righteous Brothers’ You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling. He who recorded Eddie Cochran’s, Summertime Blues, The Beach Boys’, Pet Sounds, Herp Albert’s, A Taste of Honey and even the Ramone’s, End of the Century.

Strangelet had its first gig last night and we decided to dress up a bit. Jonathan Segel wore a nice steampunk ensemble, Suki O’Kane a santa suit and myself, a gold lame w/ black fringe jumpsuit that Scottie Chapman scored at a clothing swap party last weekend.

‘Case you didn’t know, the Ivy Room has been transformed from the former dive it was. Now it is comfy couches and DJ’s…but on Mondays…wierd gets to take over – and it was cool.

We played a torrid 25 minute set of improv. We were gonna play longer, but it felt over – although we did forget to do the confusing ‘is the set over?’ outro that was planned. Oh well, next time. As is often the case, MZ and Matt Cora recorded it.

The next bunch of players competently jammed around for a bit, sounding like an unorganized Emerson Lake and Palmer meets Bitches Brew era Miles Davis. Their set suddenly took off when this guy came in with a l.e.d. embellished, pedal powered MC bicycle set-up and rapped about being a fool for fuel, pedaling bikes and taking public transit.

Who says experimental can’t be fun, short and sweet?!

Just so you know – A Stranglet is a theoretical particle that could possibly prove to be the realization of the infamous ‘Ice-Nine’ from Kurt Vonnegut’s, Cat’s Cradle. From Wiki:

If the strange matter hypothesis is correct, and a strangelet comes in contact with a lump of ordinary matter such as Earth, it could convert the ordinary matter to strange matter. This “ice-nine” disaster scenario is as follows: one strangelet hits a nucleus, catalyzing its immediate conversion to strange matter. This liberates energy, producing a larger, more stable strangelet, which in turn hits another nucleus, catalyzing its conversion to strange matter. In the end, all the nuclei of all the atoms of Earth are converted, and Earth is reduced to a hot, large lump of strange matter.

Apparently folks are not quite sure whether the giant new Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland will manage to loose a Strangelet (or even a Micro Black Hole) upon us all.

a hot, large lump of strange matter.

Back in 1998, I engineered You Can’t Do That, the only solo record by Chicago bluesman Dave Myers (who along with brother Louis, Fred Below and Junior Wells formed The Aces and were a key ingredient in the mid 50s Chicago blues sound, backing legends like Junior Wells, Little Walter, Otis Rush and various artists on the Cobra Records label). My buddy Rusty Zinn, with whom I had recently finished two records, and ace blues harmonica player Kim Wilson convinced New Orleans based BlackTop Records owner and producer, Hammond Scott to do a record.

You Can’t Do That was recorded in the big room at the old Coast recorders on Harrison Street in San Francisco (thru Dan Alexander’s sweet Neve console). It was cut live with the exception of a few vocal overdubs that Hammond felt were needed. Overdubbing was not something Dave had much experience with or a fan of, but he was game to give it a go.

Things were progressing okay, but then one tune, Stone Cold Fox simply bedeviled Dave and the whole thing degenerated into a hilarious half hour. After ten minutes of belly splitting stuff, I instructed the 2nd engineer to roll a dat tape of the overdub session so we could capture it (the 24 track master tape machine that I was operating was constantly recording over the bad vocal takes). Dave is front and center with Rusty, Hammond and myself off mic. Until now, only a handful have heard this recording, so without further ado:

What a sweet, funny man. Unfortunately, Dave passed in 2001 and I am – we all were – privileged to have been a part of it. He was such total gentleman – in fact, the man kept calling me ‘sir’ and thought I owned the studio…shit I woulda been happy to have been responsible for his coffee cup.

Happy New Year. Feels like it’s going to be an interesting one. To start it off as such, how about pulling out some skeletons in the closet?

Lauren Weisbecker, the twelve year old daughter of my high school bandmate and drummer, Will Weisbecker recently posted a comment on The Early Years. In response, I dug around for some nuggets residing in my strange but true audio folder. I found a few that merit exposure:

This was written and recorded by my friend and fab musician, Gunnar Madsen back in the late 90’s when Gunnar was a staff composer for Atari Games. He hired me to play metal guitar on this dittie for use in an auto racing arcade game called California Speed. Just imagine yourself tearing down Highway 101, becoming airborne, literally flying, smashing into trees, cars, rocks, and miraculously crossing the finish line – no doubt propelled by this double shot of caffeinated metal riffage. Since neither Gunnar nor I own any rights to this tune, I post it in the hope that one of us will get sued by Atari. We could use the exposure.

The game received a very limited release, but I did encounter it once in real life while on tour with Ramona the Pest. We were hanging out in a random sports bar in Denver, Colorado when the tune sort of wafted by. Hey that’s my guitar! I exclaimed to my skeptical bandmates as we made a beeline to the source and played it quite a few times.

This is a recording made in the late 90’s for an ad agency competition. Two friends of Steve Lucky‘s worked for a big firm in SF and Steve got me in on the gig. We recorded it on a 1/2″ 8-track reel to reel deck at my warehouse space in Berkeley. Steve plays organ and I play the slide guitar bits. A fun tune that apparently earned an honorable mention, but lost out to…a heavy metal tune. Apologies for infringing on someone’s copyright here.

And last, a classic from 1988:

R’n’R with a nod to Mr. Rogers by Manatee, a band I played in with my old college ‘mates. This is from Unlikely Mermen, our first official cassette release in 1988. Recorded on my Tascam Porta Studio 4-track in the 3rd floor living room of a dilapidated mansion in Newport, RI that the bass player and I lived in that summer. It was pretty much one big party and we pretty much wrecked the place. Erik Esckilsen plays the Bob Stinson approved end solo. Never did find out who left the phone message.

One of the best bands I have been in was Zebu. It wasn’t the most musically competent, but it was definitely the best band. Zebu was a guitar, bass and drums power trio with an all for one and one for all ethos defined by Pat Mello and Joey Schaaf, two veteran punk rock musicians. We bitched, argued and performed the good and bad together and our shows were no-holds-barred, on-the-edge affairs that always moved rooms and people. Total rock ‘n’ roll release. The only other band that came close was the Ho, but that was The Who’s material.

Zebu used to have pot and Oly beer fueled jams/rehearsals that produced almost all our material. Some of our more epic numbers were worked out from ideas brought in by Pat or me, but things usually started with a guitar riff or a pop/punk chord change, slammed into overdrive by the insane bass playing of Pat and urgent and often disfunctional drumming of Joey (the Tom Jones of drumming). This mix quickly dictated the direction of the music, with Pat and Joey picking spots to take for their own. The lyrics and melodies came fast and furious and this kept the intensity intact. We used to rely on tapes of these sessions to figure out what the heck we had done. Then we put work into the songs. We rehearsed a lot. We had to because Joey, at this point deep into his stoner phase, was either forgetting his parts or inventing new ones, thinking they were old ones. I remember hating it at times. Just one of the seeds of our eventual undoing.

I found an Old VHS of a 1999 set that ran 90+ minutes, with the last 30+ simplay making up songs on the spot. I had posted it on instagram, but I’m gone from social media now, so will get a version up here asap.

Alternatively described as ‘a cross between the Minutemen and the Who’ and ‘the Pink Floyd of punk rock’, Zebu was criminally under-recorded. We did a great four song studio recording that captured our ‘pop/punk’ thing but omitted the trippy punk/freejam side of the equation. A handful of live board tapes captured some of that, but with unfortunate sound quality.

Zebu’s heyday was 1997-2001. We still get together every once in while for a reunion show when the three of us are in Oakland at the same time. The last one was in 2006, after four years off, and it kicked ass. We made ten special Zebu reunion CDrs for that show. Each one had one song that the other nine did not. Those sold out quick. This past October, we got together for a private jam over at Jack Canada’s house. It was like the old days, small sweaty space, loud as hell and cheap beer. I wasn’t expecting much to come of it, but the energy of the Zebu was not to be denied. We absolutely rocked, wrote several great songs, long since forgotten. Too bad the tape wasn’t rolling…

Long ride the wild Zebu.

I love SPLITLIP and the people in it,
Jon Brumit,
Wayne Grim,
Suki O’Kane
and from time to time, the one and only
Jeff Hobbs.

We played in Sacramento last night at the Prescott Showcase of new, improv and jazz music hosted by our friend Ross Hammond. For some reason SPLITLIP has played more shows to fewer people in Sacto than anywhere else. But the shows are always interesting there, so the few who make it get the goods.

Things felt really great onstage and we could have played on all night or as Suki said, ‘until the electricity runs out.’

A comment overheard during a lull in one of our pieces:

‘Do these people have any talent?’

followed by this Q&A w/ Ross:

Q: ‘What do you think their influences are?’
Ross: ‘I wouldn’t know where to start.’

ALBUM next year, we should hope…(the wonderful Michael Zelner recorded this and most of our shows, so…)