Attorneys General (Guest Player: Raven Bauer Durham) Attorneys General is a project led by Matthew Byars of DC-based band The Caribbean. A formative experience for Byars as a listener was hearing the work of soundman Martin Swope of Mission of Burma on their seminal 1985 live record, The Horrible Truth About Burma, in which Swope, using a reel-to-reel tape machine, captured, looped, manipulated, and destroyed elements of the band’s sound in spontaneous and unexpected ways. Byars has adapted this approach to having three-four people (different players every time, mostly) generate utterly improvised sound through a mixing board he controls, which allows him to capture, loop, manipulate, and destroy the sounds they create. Results vary from the transcendent to the disastrous, but the inherent risk involved is, ultimately, the point.
The player for this Attorneys General set is Raven Bauer Durham: guitar, FX, loops, and acoustic percussion combine to present an intricate soundworld.
nil. Chester Hawkins (Baltimore USA) began musical activities in the 1980s cassette underground, creating a personal form of junkyard dada psychedelia and ritual noise as Blue Sausage Infant. In 2013 BSI was retired and Hawkins carried on under his own name in an avant-classical direction with cinematic surrealism and highly narrative soundworks. The aim was to tease the brain with a delicate balance of pastoral trance and paranoid tension. nil. began in March 2022 as a move towards maximal drone, exploring complex harmonics in a dynamic and powerful wall of sound. nil. material is presented without clues to the motives behind it. There will be nothing to inform the listener or offer any context of the work. nil. is sound without ego, time, structure, or agenda. In a world infected with propaganda from all sides, nil. is a celebration of absolute void.
