In the mid-1970’s, I had access to the electronic music lab at UC Santa Barbara– equipped with a wall-sized Moog, the wood-encased Electro-Comp 101, and the infamous Putney VCS3. With an appetite for composers that pushed sonic boundaries, three provided much inspiration – Karlheinz Stockhausen (“The Song of the Youths”), Robert Ashley (“Automatic Writing”) and Steve Reich (“Come Out”). A common thread is the deconstruction, manipulation, and re contextualization of the spoken word — the way they break down meaning, create new meaning, and even induce a trance-like state. I realize now that much of my own work also incorporates spoken voice (along with musique concrete and electronics). My interest in poetics during that time most likely contributed as well, as I was studying at the Naropa Institute with beat poets Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Clark Coolidge.
By the end of the 1970’s I found a sonic extension with radical, noisy, and often controversial, “industrial music”, contributing interviews and reviews to fanzines such as Option and Sound Choice. In 1983, I started a small cassette label — Swinging Axe Productions, which eventually distributed the work of dozens of DIY artists. These were the days of the “cassette underground”. Trading tapes and letters by mail, collaborating with people we’d never met, and hand-crafting the packaging.
Compilations were common, and useful for discovering other like-minded artists. In the mid-1980’s, I opened a performance space in LA called Charley’s Obsession. Though short-lived, it hosted dozens of artists ranging from electronics to post-punk to ambient to genre-less. My own albums were then being released by other labels – the first LP in 1987 being “Bacteria and Gravity” on the RRR label. The first vinyl on Swinging Axe in 1989 was “Certain Random Firings” by Static Effect — Mikhail Bohonus and myself — limited to 500 copies and each with individualized silk-screened covers.
In 1990, I began what would become a 6-hour setting for Lewis Carroll’s “Alice In Wonderland”. The project took 5 years and CDs were released serially on the Staalplaat label in special packaging. The set was later released in two more editions on the Soleilmoon label. In the following decades, other collaborative CDs were released – “Fragment 56” with Dan Burke, “Bypass Through The Sky” with Anna Homler, Atom Smith and Brad Cooper, and “Oedipus Brain Foil” with Robin Storey and Nigel Ayers. In addition, 3 CDs of my own were released under the pseudonym Shadowbug 4. To date, 45 of my albums, in various formats, have been released on US and European labels. Many are available via streaming, while since 2014 new albums appear exclusively via streaming.
In 2018, I formed The Resonance Foundation for the Arts. The mission is to promote novel and thought-provoking work by emerging artists in all fields, with an eye towards multi-disciplinary collaborations.
