My good friend Thommy Saraceno has been making music under the name Owlfood since 2003. Sometimes his wife Anna and I give a hand in whatever way we can. He’s got three releases out now—Owlfood LP (2004), Black Optics EP (2006), split cassette w/ Al Qaeda (2010)—and has a track on the Death Aesthetics comp [...]
I was asked to join Farhad Ebrahimi’s band, Summerduck, in Spring 2008. Previously Farhad (of Boston’s Night Rally) had written some songs on his own and recorded loud versions of them with Greg Moss (ex-Common Cold) on bass and Kevin Micka (Animal Hospital) on drums. I helped a little bit with these recordings and was [...]
Adam Brilla, friend and bandmate from Tiny Amps, has had for many years a musical project called The Broken River Prophet. The lineup perpetually ebbs and flows and I rode the wave for a short time as drummer and keyboardist through autumn of 2006 to winter of 2007, and again for a very brief time [...]
In 1993 I saw The Jesus Lizard at Memorial Hall in Kansas City. It fully blew my mind. My best friend’s older sister Lorrie had hipped us both to them, in addition to many other kick ass bands of the ’90s, and he and I jammed (very poorly) on TJL songs in my dad’s basement [...]
TEXT STILL TO COME! Tiny Amps Trill & Swagger LP: Dance On A Crowded Floor Backbone Salt Of The Sand Amway Tabletalk Slip & Slide Flowers Of The Friendly Ghost Dinner Zombies Carrots T-shirt design by Soner On (I still have a grip of these in every size, email me if you want one!) :
Have you ever met someone who could pick up any instrument and instantly play it proficiently? My friend Jordan is one of those people. I had the great pleasure of working with him on a few projects—Welcome Home, La Bête—and some solo recordings. The latter were made in a number of places: Harvard’s piano rooms, [...]
Patrick Rocha has been a friend of mine since we were teenagers and we’ve made music together in various capacities since 1999 (Domesticated Ohms Group, Your Reflection). He’s always been an enthusiastic supporter of my own musical endeavors, so when he asked for my help with his solo project I was more than happy to [...]
This was an experiment in structured chaos. I asked friends Greg Moss, Jeff O’Neil and Adam Brilla to improvise over programmed drum machine tracks, along with which I also played acoustic drums. None of us really knew what we were doing, but as long as things were loud and crazy it was deemed sufficient. August [...]
Frank Aveni, Eric Dahlman and Adam Franks were doing a free-improv thing and I went to see them one night at TT the Bear’s Place, Fall of 2002. It was ludicrous and I loved it. Around that same time I began playing with The Arrangement and Frank invited me to jam with Blood Cells sometime. I [...]
Summer of 2002 I escaped Chinatown to live in an apartment in Oak Square, Brighton, with a couple, Eric Boomhower and Ilona Virostek. They were both musicians and in a band called Ossiander (w/ Frank Aveni and Andy Abrahamson). Eric and Andy were also in The In Out back then. One day I heard some [...]
L. Contra was Colin Asquith’s was personal musical moniker and from time to time he’d ask Thommy Saraceno and/or myself to lend a hand with recordings and live performances. The first such collaboration was for the Villa Magica release, Christmas in Roxbury EP (2002). How exactly this record came to be was always somewhat of a [...]
Sometime in 2002 while I was living in Chinatown Luke Rocha, an old friend from Kansas City, sent me some song fragments on 4-track tapes. The project was called Arrangements in Costume. The elements he sent were sequences of various sampled material and synthesizer tracks which I then added to and mixed into cohesive songs. [...]
Jordan Anderson and I had been playing together in The Armada for a short time when he brought up the idea of playing music with Alika Herreshoff, a fellow classmate at SMFA. La Bête started practicing in a loft in Chinatown where I was living at the time, then moved to a room shared with [...]
The Arm rose from the ashes of The Armada (Colin Asquith, Thommy Saraceno and myself). We recorded four songs at Folsom Ave. using mics checked out from SMFA, Thanksgiving weekend, 2000. Mixes and overdubs were done a couple years later at Oni Gallery in Chinatown. Colin’s drawing and the songs below offer a better explanation [...]
The Mick Malone CD was a recording project done over the summer of 2000. Thommy Saraceno wrote the tunes (except “813,” written w/ L-Contra) and produced the sessions at Folsom Ave with the help of Matt Foley and L-Contra. I played drums on five of the eight songs. This record was a celebration of Thommy’s [...]
During the fall of 1999 Colin and I began making music with another SMFA classmate, Thommy Saraceno, inspired by D.E.V.O., mummies, seances, and aliens. The band name was lifted from the Kids In The Hall skit “Rod Torfulson’s Armada.” For the most part we existed as a three-piece, though we rehearsed a few times early on [...]
Maybe a year or so after moving to Massachusetts I began making music with Colin Asquith, a roommate and high school friend of the person I credit for introducing me to anyone I know in New England, Noah Peffer. This would be the first of many musical endeavors with Colin. We banged out song ideas, [...]