Tag: electric didgeridoo
“High in the Middle” Tour Begins Oct 6
Regeneration, Electric Didgeridoo Drone with Video Collage
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.
I Am How I Am
I think this might be my most ambitious music video yet. It certainly contains more raw footage, images and special effects than any music video I’ve made before, and it incorporates years of work and hundreds of hours of shooting and editing. This video was shot on-location in Germany, Sweden, Norway, the Czech Republic and both coasts of the USA, and includes clips of live performances in Germany, Sweden, the Czech Republic and the USA. I like this patchwork video look. I will probably use it again.
I recorded a lot of music this past winter, including this piece, built around a throbbing groove on the electric didgeridoo. I don’t think anyone else plays the didgeridoo the way I do, and I feel very blessed to have discovered/become entranced by this instrument and this sound. You also hear a few of my homemade musical instruments in this arrangement: a zither made from a European car license plate,
a fiddle made from a tin can with a stick through it,
and an overtone flute made from a piece of plastic waterline.
Its a pretty loose jam, but I like the energy of this track and I hope you do too.
In this track I think you can hear how eager I am to get out and perform for a live audience again. If you are booking a show, I am at the top of my game, and I want to play.
A Busy Weekend
This will be a busy weekend for my partner Amy and I.
Starting Saturday we will perform on electric didgeridoo and Theremin at the 39th Annual Summer Arts and Music festival at Benbow Lake State Recreation Area.
We are scheduled to perform starting at 9pm in the Belly-Dance tent.
No, we won’t belly-dance, but you are welcome to. If you haven’t heard us play before, this is a great opportunity. The belly-dance tent has a nice sound system, and we’ll rock the place like nothing you’ve ever heard before.
I hope to see your bouncing belly-button there.
Just a few hours later, we’ll be at KMUD’s studios in Redway for Amy’s radio show: The Living Earth Connection.
Amy will read a great monograph by visionary author Daniel Quinn called The Book of the Damned.
The Book of the Damned will change the way you think about culture, civilization and the future. Please listen.
Then, early Monday morning, I’ll be back at KMUD to engineer Monday Morning Magazine from 7-9AM with host Pat Higgins, after which, I’ll have a new essay to post.
I Entertain Children
I hope you caught my performance in the belly dance tent on Saturday night at the Mateel’s Summer Arts and Music Festival, the weekend before last. With my partner Amy Gustin on Theremin, Patrick, who I just met earlier that day, and don’t even know his last name yet, on Djembe, and Yours Truly on electric didgeridoo, we rocked that belly dance tent! Didn’t we?
As a didgeridoo player, I often find myself playing at herb shops, tea houses and yoga retreats. I don’t get to play through a bumpin’ stereo PA, for drunk people who want to dance, nearly often enough. That was a real treat. I am grateful to the Mateel Community Center for giving me that opportunity.
The Mateel treated us really well, all weekend. The Mateel knows how to treat musicians, and they treated us right. We had a great time at the event. I especially appreciate the talent coordinator, who booked us to play both in the belly dance tent, after dark, and on the kids stage, early in the day. It’s hard to know what to do with a didgeridoo player, but they gave us a broad opportunity to connect with an audience.
We were a little surprised to discover that we were booked to perform The Big Picture on The Youth Stage, sandwiched between two clowns, and a puppet show. I’m not complaining, or even poking fun here. I appreciate the gig. It’s just that we never thought of The Big Picture as children’s entertainment.
We don’t have children ourselves, or even like them much. Entertaining children is just not something we think about. I enjoy living an R rated life. I prefer not to check my language, limit the scope of my humor, or refrain from abusing drugs, so most people know better than to let their kids anywhere near me.
As a musician, I consider it my role in life to encourage people to ingest mind-altering substances, and then to make them glad they did. I consider it noble work and I take it seriously, but even I understand that recreational drug use is not appropriate for small children.
Amy conceived of The Big Picture for her Sunday morning radio show, The Living Earth Connection which airs on KMUD at 9:30 AM on the fifth Sunday of the month. Amy’s show is usually quite intellectual, and requires a bit of concentration. It’s probably over the heads of half of the adults around here, let alone the children.
We got the idea of blending my psychedelic druggie space noise didgeridoo music, with her thought provoking ideas, after listening to one of our favorite albums: Albedo 0.39 by Vangelis. Specifically the final song on the album, coincidentally also titled Albedo 0.39.
For this song, Vangelis found a clever way of adding a vocal track to his, otherwise instrumental, synthesizer music, without having to write lyrics. On Albedo 0.39, we hear a soft spoken English gentleman, with a sonorous voice and excellent diction, recite a list of statistics about Planet Earth. These include the length of the day and year according to two different measurements, the Earth’s mass, density, diameter, distance from the sun, speed, escape velocity, etc, concluding with “Albedo 0.39.”
Albedo is the percentage of light striking a non-luminous object that gets reflected back out into space. The Earth’s albedo is 0.39, or at least it was in 1973, when Albedo 0.39 came out. In other words, 39% of the sunlight that strikes the Earth, gets reflected back out into space. With the poles melting, and the Asian Brown Cloud spreading, the Earth’s albedo may have changed in the intervening years.
Swirling around this vocal track, we hear one of Vangelis’ trippiest analog synthesizer soundscapes. I always liked that piece because it makes you glad that you got good and high before you listened to it, and even though you were totally wasted, you still learned something.
We assume that most KMUD listeners are already baked at 9:30AM on Sunday morning. We thought we might try the same approach with the radio show. We would combine something over your head, with something for your head. That was the inspiration for The Big Picture.
We thought it came out pretty well, and the audience let us know that they liked it, so we decided to take it on the road, and to perform it live. That’s how we found ourselves on The Youth Stage at Summer Arts and Music Festival, performing a piece designed for KMUD’s wake-and-bake listeners, to small children who were not stoned. I learned a lot about children’s entertainment that weekend, and I got to witness some great performances by some really talented artists:
A OK The Clown devised a great interactive game that illustrates the problem of Global Climate Change. Riding a very tall unicycle, AOK pretended to be the atmosphere, while a circle of eager children surrounding him, pelted him with rubber balls, pompoms and hula hoops that symbolized the smoke, smog, and other airborne pollution that contribute to Global Climate Change. Frantically pedaling his unicycle, A OK endured a relentless shitstorm of hurled objects that brilliantly symbolized the assault on nature waged by industrial society.
Following A OK, came Mickey The Clown, an old school circus clown who was as kindly and gentle as he was entertaining. Mickey had a great song about suburban sprawl and habitat loss, told from the perspective of a frog named Freako. Freako the Frog was so catchy that I still can’t get it our of my head.
Then came our drugged out head trip, The Big Picture, with Theremin solos. After us, the Kinetic Paranormal Society Puppet Troupe took the stage. This very talented puppet troupe included a band, great puppets and terrific voice actors. Their, very funny, production also had an environmental message as well, but we never heard the end of it because we had to go get lunch before they shut down the kitchen.
Environmental education seemed to be the overarching theme of all of the acts that performed on The Youth Stage, including The Big Picture. I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, I think it’s great that clowns and puppets are educating children about environmental issues while their parents are getting smashed on overpriced beer.
On the other hand, I think, “Can’t a kid throw stuff at a clown without turning it into some kind of learning experience?” Today’s children are going to have to deal with the consequences of environmental crises, that they had no part in creating, for the rest of their lives. Do they really need to be lectured about it by a sock puppet when they are four years old? The parents need lectures not the kids.
That’s why we created The Big Picture, to lecture adults about what a fucking mess they’ve made of the planet, and where we went wrong as a society. It’s a tough message, but it’s easier to take when you’re stoned. I don’t know what the kids thought of us.
I don’t really see how you can educate kids about the environment without implicating their parents. If kids today knew how stupid, crazy and wrong their parents were, and how much damage they’ve already done to the planet, those kids would run screaming back to their mother, claw their way back up her vagina and into the womb with the admonition “Fuck you! You stupid, selfish, irresponsible idiot! Now quit fucking around and clean up this mess, and I am not coming out until you do!”
That’s what happens to kids who spend any time at all around me, before long they cuss like sailors and hate their parents. We’re happy to perform The Big Picture for birthday parties, and children’s events of all kinds, for children of all ages. You provide the drugs.
Happy Hour in The Sunset Room on the Mendocino Coast
Happy Hour in The Sunset Room on the Mendocino Coast
This Friday, November 8, from 5-9pm at the Lost Coast Culture Machine in Ft. Bragg, I’ll make my Mendocino County debut on electric didgeridoo. The Lost Coast Culture Machine is an art gallery on the North side of Ft. Bragg, and I’ll be playing in a space called “The Sunset Room” for “Happy Hour”. I don’t know exactly what “Happy Hour” means in an art gallery, but I’m told that “The Sunset Room” is an art exhibit featuring the work of several local artists.
Anne, the curator of the Lost Coast Culture Machine describes the “Sunset Room” show as “Georgia O’Keeffe meets Jimmy Buffett”, which sounds pleasant enough.
I can’t think of a more appropriate place for a show called “The Sunset Room” than Ft. Bragg, and the Lost coast Culture Machine seems like the kind of place where Georgia O’Keeffe just might run into Jimmy Buffet.
I’ll be there, doing my best to make “Happy Hour” as happy as possible.
So, please join me this Friday at “Happy Hour” from 5-9pm for an evening of electric didgeridoo music in “The Sunset Room” at the Lost Coast Culture Machine gallery at the North end of Ft. Bragg (190 E. Elm St. 707-961-1600).
Free CD for Like You’ve Got Something Better To Do Readers
Free CD for Like You’ve Got Something Better To Do Readers
So… Did you participate in last week’s Audience Participation? No? Me neither. They wanted an email address, a password and a screen name just to take their stupid survey. Fuck that! I don’t give my own mother that much information.
This week, I have a much better idea for audience participation, at least for readers in Humboldt County. This week I have two gigs that are free to attend, one in Redway and one in Arcata. Not only are these gigs free to attend, anyone who mentions this blog: Like You’ve Got Something Better To Do will receive a free CD. No work, no campaign, no tedious forms to fill out, just come out, enjoy some music, say “Hi” between sets and then mention “Like You’ve Got Something Better To Do” and you’ll get a free CD.
I’d like to see as many of you as possible at these two live events this week, and I hope you will introduce yourself and take home a free CD. Here are the details:
Local Didgeridoo Player Drones On
Local didgeridoo wiz John Hardin will bring his unique brand of trance-dance didgeridoo music to both sides of Humboldt County this week, with performances on Wednesday, October 9 at Persimmons Garden Gallery in Redway,
and on Friday, October 11 from 6-9pm in Arcata at Moonrise Herbs as part of Arts Arcata.
John blends ancient aboriginal didgeridoo tradition with techno-trance groove sensibilities to create a sound that unites the generations. That is, John’s music inspires three-year-olds to dance, hipsters dig the psychedelic rhythms, while elderly listeners enjoy the sonic massage.
John explains the appeal of his music this way: “I love this music. I don’t understand it, but this is the most original, organic and inspiring music I’ve been involved with in my 30+years as a musician. I feel like this is what I was born to do. Now that I have begun to share it with people, the response has been amazing. For as strange as this music sounds, I’m surprised at how many different kinds of people seem to enjoy it.”
John’s new album John Hardin Live Electric Didgeridoo was recorded live at The Hemp Connection in Garbervile. It is currently available there, as well as at The Works Records in Eureka, People’s Records in Arcata or through John’s blog, www.lygsbtd.wordpress.com John will also have copies of his CD for sale at both of these upcoming shows.
Something Better To Do This Weekend
Something Better To Do This Weekend
This Saturday and Sunday, September 21 and 22, folks in Northern California will have a chance to hear me play electric didgeridoo for free at the 40th annual North Country Fair on the Plaza in Arcata.
Get there early though, because I’m the first act on the North Stage, playing from 10:30-11:35AM, both days.
North Country Fair is my favorite local festival. It includes lots of great music on two stages, a samba parade, and the famous “All Species Parade” led by animal themed kinetic sculptures followed by revelers in animal costumes and puppets of all kinds.
They also have the best of our local craft artists, festive food, and information booths for local non-profits. Besides playing at the festival, I’ll be manning a booth for KMUD all weekend.
I love North Country Fair for many reasons. First, North Country Fair is a free event. It costs nothing to attend because the costs of putting on the festival are born by the craft artists and food venders. Anyone can come and enjoy the fair, whether they have money to spare or not, and people who have money, can spend it on handmade crafts, clothes and food, which supports local artists, and helps build Humboldt County’s economic diversity.
Second, North Country Fair pays all of the musicians who perform at the festival. It’s not much, but each performer, not each act, but each performer, gets paid $10 for appearing on-stage at North Country Fair. That is a token of appreciation for the work that these artists put into their acts.
When you listen to a live musical act, you enjoy the fruits of years of training and practice, months of rehearsal, hundreds, if not thousands of dollars worth of instruments and equipment, not to mention the courage to get up on-stage and the energy it takes to pour themselves out for an audience.
Too many local festivals, (like the big one at the beginning of the Summer in SoHum) pay big bucks for a headline act, but expect local musicians to work for free. At the same time, they charge admission to the festival, even though local craft artists pay the expenses of putting it on, and volunteers provide most of the labor for free.
Yes, the folks who put on North Country Fair (The Same Old People) may not make much money themselves, (which comes from beer, wine and t-shirt sales) but they provide an excellent example of how a community non-profit should operate. The Same Old People don’t own a world-class concert hall, but they know how to support the arts in a small rural community.
Like You've Got Something Better To Do 