BARAKA BASHMENT

I found my first guitar in my own trash-can.

I was 9.

The first recording I made was that same night when I took one of my step-brothers “sound effect” records, put on the track of helicopters, turned up the volume, plugged in my new working red trash-guitar and hit record on my Texas Instruments tape recorder and made a “song.”

It was a love affair ever since.

The first band I decided to learn every song by was Black Sabbath.

From here I jumped into anything German and noisy. And from there I discovered Sonic Youth “Confusion is Sex” and Sonic Youth “Sonic Death” followed immediately by Michael Gira’s The Swans “Kill the Child: Live ‘85-’87.”

Needless to say this has a major impact on a pre-teen’s musical tastes.

When I go back to my mom’s house and look through my old mix tapes I smile at how I managed to make the mix-tape series titled “METAL” 1 thru 7 include such diverse bands as Jane’s Addiction, King’s X, The Cure, Iron Maiden, Kiss (with make-up), The Black Crows all under the genre metal. Awesome.

Over the past few days I have been reinvestigating my noise-violence music leanings that I had left about 8 years ago. Things don’t seem to have changed much, and I’m happy about that. The Japanese are still mutilating ears more than ever and the American scene is still as diverse as it will always be.

Last night I began digging through a whole stew of old homemade cassette recordings of mine and converted about twenty six tracks of noise etc to cd to remix.

This on the heels of playing roots folk traditions for the past year or so.

Dub/dancehall on the decks.

I will sing for the most disturbingly brutal noise band ever if asked.

etc etc