A Belted Vinyl Monitor Live at The Granoff Center, Brown University :|: Sat, April 28, 2012

If you look at side horse dead on, it looks like a horse hiding behind something, peaking out at ya. But there's nothing there to hide behind - it just doesn't have that side. More often than is realistically plausible, we are confronted by a gang of enormous prudes. They like to ask us "does a side horse come prepared?" "How does one proctor a side horse?" "What is symptomatic of a side horse on the prowl?" It is very challenging to answer this kind of nonsense without losing your sense of touch. We prefer to stay in touch with as much side horse as makes the horses themselves the most comfortable. You can tell when a side horse is comfortable by how dripping wet are its gums. And now hold on just a second - you never want to tell a side horse which side it is. You never want to tell a side horse anything. It is still a variety of horse. It is not something to hold a conversation with. You must be thinking with your spines…

Tom Iadecola - guitar, pedals
Benny Lichtner - words, vocal chords, laptop, toys
Arvid Tomayko-Peters - TOOB, trumpet, keys, trackpad, laptop
Elliot Creager - guitar, little analog box

Listen:

• Relative to the Function of a Flat 13:46
• Mostly Feeble 15:32
• The Babies in the Trees 16:25

Transcontinental Collaboration One :|: May, 2012

The first of (hopefully) a number of transcontinental collaborations between Barbara and me. The Oud is in a non-standard tuning - what Barbara describes as a "weird" tuning. For my part, I wanted to augment Barbara's fantastic Oud playing with sound derived from itself - all the sonic material, except for one small auditory event, are from the Oud performance you hear in the piece. Barbara's original performance is mostly intact, with only a few deletions, repetitions and timing adjustments. The dense sounds I added are loops recorded and performed in realtime while listening through the Oud recording, then edited and time stretched to better fit with the rhythms and flow of the performance. I also added other small events and edits with the intention of subtly extending the capabilities of the Oud - just beyond what it could do in the real life.

Painting by Barbara and Arvid - 2011

Barbara Byers - Oud - recorded in San Francisco, CA
Arvid Tomayko-Peters - Loops and Editing - in Providence, RI

Listen:

• Transcontinental Collaboration One 13:15