Category: recording artists

Beyond Words

Solstice Greetings,

At the conclusion of another cataclysmic year I’m very grateful to share this beam of sunshine:

This music has inspired me and kept me sane through these trying times. I don’t know where this music comes from, why it has called me to it, or why it feels so good, but it does. It just does. Beyond Words is hot, throbbing, organic EDM like you’ve never heard before, but it is also a collection of didgeridoo solos rich with healing infra-sound vibrations, recorded live with no accompaniment or overdubs. You have to hear it for yourself.

Right now, on the darkest night of this dark year, there has never been a better time to shake off the fear, shake off the anxiety and shake off the trauma of this whole crazy mind-fuck and shake your booty to these energizing ecstatic dance rhythms. Just crank it up and let it move you. I dare you.

I feel this music has more power than anything I can say with words, and everyone seems to understand it at some level. All I care about right now is sharing this music with as many people as possible. If you like this album, You have really got to hear me play live. Live music matters. We need to come together again to make music and dance. It is absolutely critical to the functioning of culture. There is so much more that happens when we come together to make music and dance than we can ever describe in words, and it is essential that we revive that vital organ immediately.

Wherever you are, I want to play for you. Let’s make the arrangements. Covid restrictions be damned, this show is going on the road in 2022! Fuck the variants! The curve is as flat as its going to get. It’s time to dance!

Call or text me: 707-572-8837

email: tincanluminary@yahoo.com

Have a wonderful solstice! See you in 2022!

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:

Careful With that Vax Eugene

It’s been funny to watch the mainstream media downplay the “lab leak” theory of the origin of Covid-19. I mean, to me, this seems like a big story, right? “Sloppy Scientists Unleash Global Pandemic” I think that would sell some papers, or bait some clicks, or whatever it is people do to find out what someone else knows that they don’t these days, especially since Tony Fauci’s fingerprints are all over the crime scene, with the NIH funding some of the most dangerous (not to mention illegal, insane, and prohibited by international treaty) work with bat corona viruses remarkably similar to the one wrecking havoc all over the world right now.

Pretty much everyone has now admitted that the “lab leak” theory is at least plausibly, if not likely responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic. It certainly makes sense to me. “Lab Leak” should be Tony Fauci’s middle name. Tony “Lab Leak” Fauci oversaw the bio-defense lab at Ft Detrick that leaked bio-hazards into the Frederick, MD water supply over one-hundred times between 2004 and 2012.

Fauci earned his reputation for doing very risky science, sloppily, at Ft Detrick, but even then, many questioned whether all of those releases were accidental. Many wondered whether Fauci’s crew at Ft Detrick were intentionally experimenting with bio-weapons on unsuspecting American civilians. Instead of getting to the bottom of of those questions, congress prohibited, so called, “gain of function” research, and closed the lab at Ft. Detrick.

Flash forward to today: What does it mean that Tony “Lab Leak” Fauci worked with the Chinese Communist Party, the Department of Defense, and the CIA, among others, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, to genetically engineer bat corona viruses to infect humans? That seems like a pretty big story on its own, don’t you think? Don’t you want to know what’s up with that?

There’s something unreal about this whole pandemic. I’m not saying that the virus isn’t real, or that it isn’t killing people. I think the virus is real, I just don’t believe the story we are being told about it is true. I completely understand that they want me to be frightened of the virus. They want me to be so frightened of the virus that I run to the clinic for the experimental “vaccine.”

I also know that they want me to believe that the “vaccine” is “absolutely safe and effective.” I heard my County Health Officer say exactly that, and I practically choked. Nothing is absolutely safe and effective, nothing, so I knew that was a lie. It is certainly not true of these experimental new “vaccines,” which have already killed thousands of Americans, and crippled thousands more, but no one wants to cover that story either. Instead, they ask, “What do we have to say to get you to take the shot?”

Clearly, they’ll say anything, whether it is true or not, to get their poison in our arms. But some of us remain unconvinced. So, now the government has stepped-up the pressure with mandates for government workers to get “vaccinated”, and they’re encouraging all employers to follow suit. From now on, you will surrender sovereignty over your own body chemistry as a condition of employment. A lot of Americans will do it too, not because they think the vaccine will protect them, or because they think getting the shot is a good idea, but because the only thing that scares Americans more than Covid or the creepy new “vaccine” is unemployment.

I don’t pretend to know more than I do. I don’t know where Covid came from, but I know where Fauci came from. I know where Pfizer came from. I know where Biden came from, and I don’t like where they are taking us, and I sure the fuck don’t trust them enough to let them stick a needle in my arm.

I’m plenty frightened by what I see right now, but I think we should all be very careful about what we think we know, what is possible, and who we trust, because the stakes are very high for all of us, and the decisions we make right now, under duress, will set the course of history.

This old Pink Floyd song really captures the angst that I’m feeling at the moment. I remade Careful With That Axe Eugene with some of the instruments from the Orchestra of the Unwanted. This track features the Spring Bass, Tin Can Fiddle, and $20 Vocoder as well as Talking Drum and voice. I hope you like it.

The $20 Vocoder

I bought this old Casiotone CT-360 keyboard at a yard sale in Garberville, for $5, with the express purpose of bending it. That is, hacking the circuit-board to exploit whatever glitches, distortion and weirdness I could coax out of it. So, the first thing I did when I got it home was take the back off of it, exposing the circuit-board, turned it on, and started one of those cheesy rhythms playing while I probed the circuit. All weekend I kept playing those incessant mechanical rhythms. I even put a block of wood under one of the keys, so notes kept bleating for hours. I found quite a few interesting short-circuits on the board, but the noise almost drove me crazy.

As those canned rhythms churned on and on and random notes screamed away for hours on end, the internal speaker impressed me with its brightness, and overall volume. In other words, it was F-ing loud. The speaker made bending convenient, but I didn’t imagine I would use it much, since I usually plug electronic instruments directly into a mixer or recorder, and listen to it on my studio monitors. In fact, when I needed a place to mount the knobs and switches that trigger the glitches and malfunctions I found on the circuit-board, the speaker grill, located directly to the left of the keys seemed the perfect location.

I removed the speaker, cut a hole in the speaker grill, and mounted all of the switches and knobs on a wooden disc I recycled from a round box that originally contained a small wheel of goat-milk brie cheese. It fit perfectly. I added a quarter-inch phone jack, and a switch that allows you to turn the internal speaker, a smaller, quieter speaker that I added, and placed elsewhere in the device. When I finally put the whole thing back together, it all malfunctioned perfectly.

But I had this speaker left over, this loud, bright, 3W 4Ohm 5” Samsung driver. Then I had an idea. It wasn’t an original idea, and it wasn’t the first time I’d thought of it, but clearly its time had come. Joe Walsh and Bob Heil put this idea in my head a long time ago with the guitar solo to “Rocky Mountain Way.” I loved that song when I was a kid. Heil and Walsh worked together to build a device that works on this principle for the vocalized guitar solo in that song. Heil went into production with the device, dubbing it the “Talk Box” and gave one of the very first production models to Peter Frampton who famously used it on “Do You Feel Like We Do?” David Guilmore used one on “Pigs” on the Pink Floyd album “Animals” and many other artists found use for this device as well.

I believe Heil still makes some version of the Talk Box. Craig Anderton, in his book “Electronic Projects for Musicians” tells you how to build something like Heil’s Talk Box, but he recommends using the driver from a horn speaker, so his design requires no funnel. However, I once interviewed Bob Heil for my radio show, and I asked him about the Talk Box and how they created that sound. In that interview, Bob Heil told me that they set out to recreate an old blues trick of putting a funnel with a piece of hose attached to it, over the speaker of a guitar amplifier. By putting the other end of the hose in his mouth, a player could appear to “sing” guitar notes by silently moving his mouth.

None of the modern designs for this kind of effect use a funnel with a conventional paper cone driver. Instead, they all use a more specialized driver, but I knew about the funnel from talking to Bob Heil, and it works well. I’m sure it helps that it is such a loud and bright little speaker, and such a loud and bright little synthesizer. They work marvelously together, but the device will work with any audio source loud enough to drive the speaker without burning it out. I really love the way this device allows you to sculpt sound, turning relatively flat electronic signals into full bodied musical expressions. I’m completely hooked on it and I expect to use it quite a bit in the future. I’m sure a lot of musicians would have use for a device like this, and I hope this encourages some of them to build one for themselves.

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:

EX-NIH WHISTLEBLOWER EXPOSES FAUCI

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.