Category: folk art
CA Based Recording Artist Returns to his Ohio Roots
Why a Snake?
I’m working on a movie project with Myles Moscato about what it took, and who it took, to overcome half-a-century of anti-marijuana propaganda and reintroduce America to hemp. In the process, I’ve had to review a lot of old anti-drug propaganda. It’s kind of a walk down memory lane, and this memory goes back just about as far as I can remember. This was my first introduction to marijuana.
I must have been three or four the first time I saw this ad, and I’m sure I saw it hundreds of times on TV during weekday early morning cartoons. I’m sure I never heard of marijuana before I saw this ad. I remember that this ad was also the first, and only, time I ever heard of smoking corn silk, which I eventually tried. Looking back, the comparison to smoking corn silk hints of hemp’s agricultural roots. It reminded me of this old country song about cannabis:
Back to the AMA’s PSA, I understood what Tinker toys were, because I had them at the time.
I had no idea who the AMA were, but, having seen their ad, I was much more curious about their logo than I was marijuana. I liked snakes very much as a child. I remember wondering about that snake.
It only appeared briefly, but there it was, a snake, wrapped around a stick, only for a second, and with no explanation. Why a snake?
That’s one of my oldest memories. Finding this relic brought it right back. The War on Drugs was real. It was a psychological information war waged against the American people. This movie will be about what it takes to overcome a multi-billion dollar propaganda machine and change the minds of Americans.
I’m excited about this project and am eager to get it out, but I also find this old anti-drug propaganda fascinating in and of itself, both historically and rhetorically, as well as aesthetically and psychologically, but also nostalgically, because it was so integral to my early development.
Beyond Words, Saturday Feb 12 @ Papa and Barkley in Eureka
My lifelong dream comes true at the Papa and Barkley Social Club at the South End of Eureka on Broadway on Saturday February 12. I have dreamed, since I was very young, of playing music in a comfortable public space that encouraged people to consume cannabis rather than alcohol.
I love cannabis, and have always preferred cannabis to alcohol. I think alcohol has had a negative influence on our culture, but I strongly believe that if we gather together in an environment that celebrates the symbiosis between music and cannabis, it will transform our culture in profound and positive ways.
This free event, sponsored by Papa and Barkley, called “Puffs for Non-Profits,” benefits the Ink People Center for the Arts. The cannabis dispensary will donate 10% of their total sales for the day to The Ink People Center for the Arts. I cannot say enough about the Ink People. When you find anything really cool going on in Humboldt County that showcases local artists, you can bet the Ink People are behind it. Besides that, the Ink People have helped me tremendously and I owe them a huge debt of gratitude. I love them, and I want them to keep doing what they do, so I hope you will come out and enjoy some of Humboldt’s finest with me.
I believe in the power of music to transform culture, and I believe in the power of the music I’m making now more than at any time in my life.
At Papa and Barkley’s Social Club I’ll be throwing down hot didgeridoo dance grooves with DJ Tim Stubbs,
Together we will levitate even the most couch-locked cannabis consumers into soaring rhythmic spasms of ecstasy.
Papa and Barkley has a nice outdoor space, with heaters, awnings, tables with umbrellas and heaters in the center, and plenty of seating.
Of course, they also have a terrific assortment of fine Humboldt County grown cannabis.
They don’t have a stage, but there’s wall to set up in front of, and some space to dance, and that’s all we need really, and we’ve never needed it more.
We need this now more than ever because we stand at a critical juncture in human history. We need a new vision of the world we want to live in, because our old world is gone. It’s been destroyed by the pandemic lockdown. Media hysteria is leading us down a blind alley. We need a new vision of a bright future where freedom, beauty and our boundless love for each other and all of nature shapes the future of humanity. To inspire that new vision, we need art, and that includes music. We need creativity of all kind, but before that, we need to shake off the fear.
We have all been traumatized, shell-shocked, and terrorized by the events of the last two years. We need to shake off that trauma. Natures way to relieve the residual stress, anxiety and tension stored in the nervous system after a traumatic experience, is to dance. Dancing helps your immune system fight off pathogens and coming together in groups helps our bodies maintain good immune defenses. Ecstatic dance feels good. We need to remember what it feels like to feel good, because we need a vision of the future inspired by what makes us feel good, rather than what scares us.
So please, come out to Papa and Barkley in Eureka on Saturday February 12. Get really high on top-flight herb, soak-in some dance beats infused with healing infrasound vibrations and do what feels good. We’ve been denied this basic necessity of life for too long. A lot of us have nearly forgotten how exhilarating a great party can be, and there is a whole lot of young people who have never experienced the magic that happens when live musicians connect with a live audience in a real place in real time. Please come out to help us bring that magic back to life for now and for the future.
The Chaos Panel
As I promised a few weeks ago, when I demonstrated the $20 Vocoder, today I will introduce you to the “Chaos Panel,” I installed on my Casiotone CT-360 and show you what happens when you play with the knobs and switches thereupon. I call it the “Chaos Panel” because ordinarily you would call something like this a “control panel,” in that the knobs and switches on it would allow you to control some device. However, the knobs and switches on this panel don’t allow you to control anything. They might trigger something, or unleash something or make something happen, but there’s no way of knowing what, ahead of time. I have been playing with these knobs for a while now, and they still mystify me.
I installed these knobs and switches based on experiments I conducted on the circuit-board of the instrument. I found places where I could creatively short-circuit the device in such a way that effected the sound in an interesting way, and then I wired those connections to the knobs and switches on the Chaos Panel. Now that I have them all wired up and can use them simultaneously, they create even more chaos.
I like unpredictability in a musical instrument, and stochasticism in music generally. Often randomly generated patterns or sounds inspire creativity. On the other hand, the stock sounds on this old, super-bright sounding, ‘80s era digital synthesizer sound great when I use my mouth to modify the sound with the $20 Vocoder. Sometimes, playing with the Chaos Panel renders the machine completely dysfunctional, and I wonder how or if I will ever get it to work again. Then, just as mysteriously, it will snap back to perfect working order. It truly is a temperamental clavier.
I haven’t found the CT-360 quite as prolifically unpredictable as my much smaller, Casio ML-1 with light-up mini-keys from the ‘90s, but I have coaxed some interesting sounds and rhythms out of this machine. In this demonstration video you can see how some of these knobs and switches effect the sound in real time.
And here’s a little spontaneous composition I recorded with it:
Vax Nazis Suck, but Pink Floyd Rocks
Really, I don’t like to be the guy with the obtuse opinion, and I’ve got better things to do than spend my time explaining the obvious to a hostile audience in deep denial, but push has come to shove, and the vax nazis have gone on the offensive. Vaccine mandates and vaccine passports must be stopped. I cannot believe how many Democrats and liberals have fallen for the bullshit rhetoric about this pandemic and these experimental new drugs, and are willing to trade their own, and their neighbors, rights as citizens, and as sovereign human beings, for the life of livestock and lab rats. When I think of how many Americans died to secure and protect those rights through the years, just to watch you throw them away, for the false promise of protection from a disease that kills less than 1% of the people who catch it, I can’t just sit back and watch it happen. I have to say something.
When I see the media working diligently to turn neighbor against neighbor, as they tell us lies like: “This new wave of infection is driven by the unvaccinated.” and “the vaccine-hesitant are causing the virus to mutate” even though they have no science to back it up, and all common sense contradicts them, reminds me of the War on Drugs. Drug war lies ranged from: “marijuana makes colored men violent and rape white women.” and “marijuana makes Mexicans lazy and stupid.” to “crack cocaine is 100 times more addictive than powdered cocaine” and “the new marijuana is 40 times more dangerous than the old marijuana.”
This vaccine obsession should remind you of the War on Drugs too. The government lies. Don’t ever forget that, and when the government lies big like this, and the media falls in line, lock step, like they are now, you can bet it is a war, and you can bet that this war is not about what they tell you it is about. In all my life, I have never seen the government mobilize this kind of media dominance for anything except war (and those wars have never been about what they said they were about): The War on Drugs (protect Americas youth), the first Persian Gulf Way (liberating Kuwait from a bloodthirsty Saddam),9/11 and the War on Terror (Find Osama bin Laden), and the Invasion of Iraq (Saddam’s WMDs).
The War on Drugs. Do you remember that bullshit? Mandatory minimum sentences, drug testing in the workplace, zero tolerance, paraquat, CAMP, DARE, gang warfare, prison overcrowding, crack babies, millions dead, tens of millions arrested, millions more lives ruined, and three generations of activists had to devote their lives to walking this insanity back, and we are not even close yet. I want to remind you of the War on Drugs so that you remember just how out-of-hand things can get, if you let yourself believe that the government has your best interest at heart when it pulls shit like this.
This vaccine hysteria has gotten way out of hand. If you are one of those people who is beginning to turn on your jab-resistant peers, you really need to check yourself. I know that you hear the same story from every single trusted media outlet you turn to, and the story they tell is very simple: “Everyone must get vaccinated or we’ll never be able to take our masks off, or go to a concert or have a party again.” You can’t understand why anyone wouldn’t take a couple of jabs in the arm to make everything all better again, especially since everyone says the vaccines are “safe and effective.”
I’m sorry folks, but when was the last time you heard a drug commercial in the media that didn’t have a long list of side-effects read at auctioneer speed at the end of it. What makes you think these “vaccines” are any different? The CDC’s VAERS program reports over 10,000 deaths following the vaccine, and hundreds of thousands of severe reactions, some with long-term, disabling conditions like paralysis. I would feel awful if that happened to someone I had encouraged to take the jab over their own reservations, and so would you. The media, on the other hand, doesn’t mind lying to you at all, and doesn’t care whether you live or die. They are just weapons in a war, and this is another war against us all, just like the War on Drugs, only in reverse.
In the War on Drugs, they lied to us about drugs to get us to stop taking them; today they’re lying to us about drugs to get us to take them, and if that doesn’t work they’ll make it hard to get a job, go to school, get a license, travel, and they will do their level best to stigmatize you and turn your friends and family against you. Since the truth is not on their side, these coercive measures are the only way to get people to comply, but it will breed resentments. These lies will break-up families, destroy friendships, and tear at the fabric of our society, and those are intentional objectives in this kind of war.
It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time, not that long ago, when most Americans had no experience with cannabis, let alone LSD. Back then, people believed whatever bullshit the government told them about these drugs because neither they, nor anyone they knew, had ever seen, let alone tried them. After this indoctrination, however, they sure didn’t want their kids getting involved in anything so sordid as illegal drugs, and they were on the lookout for signs of drug use in their neighborhood.
When they finally did catch their own kids with cannabis, they did just what the government told them to do. They called the cops, on their own kids. Later, in the DARE program, they got kids to rat on their parents and friends, for smoking weed, and then the government destroyed their lives. Millions of lives were lost or destroyed because gullible Americans believed the bullshit they saw on TV. They turned on people in their own community. They turned on their friends, and they turned on family, because they believed what they saw on TV.
This lead to bitter resentments, estrangement, and rebellion. Families suffered, communities foundered, and a counter-culture emerged that rejected this intolerant mainstream ideology, and proudly celebrated cannabis and psychedelics. Within that counter-culture that celebrated cannabis and psychedelics, there emerged a new kind of music that defied all the accepted norms of pop music. This music just didn’t make sense unless you were high on drugs, Hendrix’s feedback, the Dead’s Space, and Zappa’s Freak Out immediately come to mind. On the other side of the world, Syd Barrett’s notorious consumption habits and subsequent collapse, as well as his Zippo-lighter slide-guitar on Astronomy Domini forever marked Pink Floyd as counter-cultural celebrants of psychedelics.
Pink Floyd has several “songs” that really don’t make much sense unless you are really high, and I love them for that. I feel that this kind of music connects to something primal within us. There are no lyrics that you can write that can liberate us from this culture, but there’s a feeling in this music that is deeper than words, and when you tap into that feeling, it tells a whole other story. Roger Waters once described this song as “a poignant appraisal of the contemporary social situation” I’d say that’s more true now than ever. Here’s my cover of the Pink Floyd song “One of These Days” played on electric bass, tin can violin, Omnichord and voice. I hope you like it!
Gain of Function Research in Wuhan and Here at Home
Senator Rand Paul filed a criminal report with the US Justice Department last week, accusing Dr Anthony Fauci of lying to Congress about US taxpayer funded “gain of function” research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China. Here’s what it looked like:
It sure looks to me like Fauci lied to Congress. And I’m guessing he lied because “gain of function” research on pathogenic viruses is not only insanely foolhardy, and extremely dangerous, it is a violation of federal law and international treaty. It also appears that Fauci, whether or not he funded the invention of this particular pandemic with our money, could have created a similar global pandemic, by accident, if some of the man-made viruses they created there in Wuhan, ever escaped. Incidentally, it also appears that this pandemic, that has so impacted all of us for the last 16 months or so, may have originated in that very lab.
I hope the Justice Department takes up this case and gets to the bottom of it, because we deserve to know the truth, but I think it informative to see how Fauci responded under pressure. “You don’t know what you are talking about… and I want to say that officially. You don’t know what you are talking about.” That’s how Fauci handles anyone who questions his judgment. He’s the Scientist, after all. How could we lay-people possibly fathom the infinite secrets of Science? See, when you are a Scientist you can revoke peoples civil rights, usurp their democracy, destroy their economy and order them around like children, because you are the only one who understands Science. Essentially, Fauci has declared himself the Pope of Science.
I know he looked smart next to Trump, but Paris Hilton’s dog looks smarter than Trump. Fauci lies. One week he says masks are useless, the next week he makes them mandatory. That’s not science, that’s Simon Says. The more you know about Fauci, the less you like him, and the less you trust him. He’s lead our germ-warfare program for as long as I can remember, and his top-secret lab at Ft Detrick leaked biohazards into the Frederick, MD water supply more than 100 times. When that information hit the papers, the public outrage got the lab closed down, but Fauci took the work over to Wuhan. It is also very curious how Fauci got the funding for the lab at Ft Detrick. That funding was prompted by the as yet unsolved Anthrax Letters Case. Someone should be looking for Fauci’s fingerprints there too. And I don’t think this woman is wrong about Fauci either:
Frankly, I pegged Fauci as the inventor of this disease from the beginning, and I don’t know why you didn’t too. I can’t understand why more people don’t see through the fear-mongering and purple rhetoric to the fact that we are being lied to. Covid is a lot more like the flu than it is like ebola, and we should treat it that way. The response to covid has done far more harm than the disease ever will. Yes, they lied to you about the pandemic, and they are lying to you about the vaccine. You don’t need to be a genius to figure that out. Hell, Rand Paul figured it out. The single most frightening thing about this whole experience, to me, is how few of the people I used to see as my political allies, can see it.
The real test of critical thinking is not whether or not you can see the little inconsistencies in new information that you are skeptical about. The real test of critical thinking lies in how well you see the big lies coming from respected authorities that are infinitely echoed in the culture and media. It takes more than reason and logic to see those lies; it also takes courage and conviction. Entirely too many people have failed that test, and I find that very discouraging.
Even though people continue to disappoint me, music never has. Music continues to sustain me through this entire ordeal. In fact I’ve been involved with my own “gain of function” research here in the solar-powered off-grid studios of Catlandia. Like Dr Fauci and his colleagues working in Wuhan, I think most people, if they saw what I was doing, would think me insane. Unlike Fauci, however, I’m not going to lie about it.
I found this toy drum machine in a thrift store in Arcata. I want you to know that I would never buy something like this new. I don’t want to support the mass produced electronic toy market in any way. These things are an affront to nature. They are full of toxins and heavy metals, they’ll never biodegrade, and they sound awful. In other words, they embody our modern, post-industrial high-tech culture perfectly. Like Fauci, when confronted with the perfection of life on Earth, I thought I could make some improvements.
As is often the case with thrift store electronics, this toy didn’t work when I bought it. I found the battery box full of leaking batteries and corroded contacts, so I had to clean up that mess before I got it to power up, and then discovered an intermittent short that caused the speaker volume to change dramatically and unpredictably. I traced the short to loose capacitor on the circuit board. When I re-soldered that, it worked like new.
Then, like Fauci, I went looking for trouble, and started messing with stuff I didn’t understand. I found a few spots on the circuit-board that, when connected with a bit of resistance, could speed-up, or slow-down the processor speed of the rhythm sample player. This allowed me to control the pitch and tempo of the rhythm patterns both more precisely, and over a much wider range than the manufacturer ever intended, by just adding a couple of knobs and switches. Like Fauci, I have no idea what I’ve done. I just know that it works differently now, and it can do more than it used to. Here’s a demonstration:
Fortunately for me, gain of function research on discarded electronic toys is not banned by an international treaty which the US has ratified, so I don’t have any reason to lie to congress about it. Unlike Fauci, my gain of function research hasn’t started a global pandemic or made me rich and famous, but hey, anything is possible. Here is a piece of music I composed for this modified drum toy, overtone flute, tin can violin and voice. You might not like it, but at least it won’t kill you.
Tiki Spoon Cello
A couple of weeks ago, I found this giant wooden spoon in an Arcata thrift store. It didn’t take much imagination to figure out what to do with it. It’s practically a ready-made string instrument, so the question became: how many and what kind? I have quite a few string instruments in my “Orchestra of the Unwanted.” I’ve got harps, lyres, zithers, fiddles, guitars and basses, but I don’t have much that sounds like a cello.
I like the sound of a cello, so I strung this spoon with a pair of pretty beefy (1mm) stainless steel strings, mounted a piezoelectric pickup on the bridge and a quarter-inch jack on the bowl of the spoon, and now it does a pretty good impersonation of a cello. It has a ton of upper harmonic response, that can easily get out of hand, but if you can keep it from squealing, it sings with depth and clarity.
In this piece, you can hear how the deep cello voice anchors the quartet of recycled instruments.
You can find much more music by Tin Can Luminary and the Orchestra of the Unwanted at: http://www.johnhardin.bandcamp.com and you can find pictures of all of the instruments, along with demonstration videos at: http://www.electricearthmusic.wordpress.com
Sky Harp
One of my early musical influences, and one that ignited my interest in building unusual musical instruments was Francesco Lupico’s Cosmic Beam Experience. The Cosmic Beam was the first long-string instrument I had ever seen, and the sound it made blew my mind. The fact that he built it from the channel beam of a flat-bed semi truck trailer also appealed to me.
Ever since then, I’ve wanted to build a long-string instrument, but the logistics of such a thing proved challenging. Where would I put it? I don’t have room for anything ten feet long, anywhere indoors, regardless of its other dimensions.
A couple of weeks ago, I stood a fir pole on end, and tied it to the corner of my woodshed. I had used the top and bottom of the pole to make a small keyboard stand for my circuit-bent toy keyboards,
…but I had this piece of fir sapling, about 15 ft long, left over, so I stood it up on end, and tied it to the corner of my woodshed, like a flagpole. I stood there looking at it for a while, wondering what I could do with it, when an idea flashed in my mind, and I saw this fir pole in a whole new light: as the backbone of a vertical (at least for storage), outdoor, long-string instrument. Then it occurred to me that a vertical, outdoor, long-string instrument, just might function as a wind-harp too.
I love wind harps. You don’t see them very often. When you do, it is usually in the window sill of the home of someone with money and taste, an extremely rare combination these days. I’ve been meaning to build one of those too.
Suddenly, I had a vision of a vertical, outdoor, electro-acoustic, long-string wind harp with radio antenna aesthetics. Once I had that vision, even swarms of hungry mosquitoes couldn’t prevent me from building it.
Now that it exists, I get to hear exactly what it sounds like, and to find its voice. I played it a bit in the vertical position, and I got it to make some cool sounds, but I couldn’t reach very far up the strings, which I found limiting. However, when I let the wind play it, it sang! Beautifully! I may just let the wind play it from now on.
What does the Future Sound Like?
Do you hear crickets? I guess it has been pretty quiet here recently, but not in my studio. I’ve made a ton of new music recently. I realize that a lot of people still read my blog for my acerbic wit and astute social commentary, but today, Democrats lie about the “pandemic” and the “vaccine” as much as Republicans lie about the “stolen election” and “massive voter fraud.” Nobody lives in reality any more, so what’s the point in writing about it.
Frankly, I think it is too late for social criticism. Our culture is dead. We are all grieving, in denial, or both. Either way it makes no sense to speak ill of the dead. Instead, I think we should call on the spirits of our ancestors to guide us into the future. That’s where music comes in. Our ancestors communicated through music for hundreds of generations before the invention of language, and music still speaks to us with more clarity, eloquence, and emotion, than words can ever express. Unfortunately, we live in a society with a very limited musical vocabulary, and as a result, a very narrow mindset.
My music accepts the death of this culture. I am not inspired by our culture’s great technological achievements, and you won’t find a lot of high-tech synthesizers and music equipment in my studio. Instead, you will find a lot crudely homemade instruments assembled from recycled materials and found objects. My music grows out of the wreckage of our failed colonial empire.
At this unique point in history, the whole world is littered with vast quantities of exotic high-tech synthetic polymers and metals in a whole variety of alloys and in myriad shapes. We are not the first empire to produce grand, impressive sounding music to inspire us with a vision of a glorious future. We are the first to try to survive in a world so profoundly transformed by an expired culture. This is what it sounds like.
Like You've Got Something Better To Do 