Crow With No Mouth

The always astute and eloquent Jesse Goin has posted a nice essay about the Startless release Circulation Decay as well as my Brombron collaboration with Ben Gwilliam entitled Dots. The piece can be found at Goin's Crow With No Mouth blog.

Below is a taste, but be sure to check out the rest of the blog for specifics about the two releases mentioned above. Also, be sure to browse through Goin's other writing. His blog exhibits consistently high quality analysis of both recorded work and live performance. Additionally, through his Crow With No Mouth Productions, Goin curates a really top notch performance series.

"Jason Zeh has been focused for some years on making intimate, meticulously crafted sound works by every means possible within the medium of cassettes. He has looped, posted, manipulated, burned, frozen and punctured magnetic tape in compositions that, should you give them your close attention, reveal hermetic, muted worlds of endless, super-saturated detail and activity. Zeh's skeins and spools of sound almost always play out around a hushed, submerged column of smokey droneage, Zeh bending, warping and mangling the details as they appear and float away.

Magnetic tape has conveyed musical content for so long, the lineage of musicians who have turned their sights and manipulative hands on the medium itself are really few and far between [Zeh's contemporaries, limiting the field to instrumentation, are most notably Howard Stelzer and Stephen Clover, a.k.a. Seht]. Zeh shares aspects of an overlapping sensibility with Jason Lescalleet and, specifically in his predilection for nearly entombing rich sonic details in tape-murk, Graham Lambkin."

Show @Howard's

More Links Than Content

I got a couple of presents in the mail today. The first is a box of Human Quena Orchestra Lps. This is the vinyl version of the A Natural History of Failure CD that was originally released on Utech Records. This Lp version was released by Handmade Birds, a label that is going to release a cassette for me as soon as I can get it together to finish the final edits. ANHOF is a marvelous, post-industrial, doom record that I was fortunate enough to be able to contribute to along with Matthew Reis, Brandon Nickell, Renata Castagna, David Graham, and Ryan Unks. I have 5 copies. If you want one, let me know.

Pictured with those records is the new Joe Panzner CD, Clearing, Polluted, on Copy For Your Records. You can find a write-up by the very eloquent Jesse Goin at the Crow With No Mouth blog.

Toledo: Oct. 9th

Don't forget that it is the Robinwood Concert House's 3rd anniversary and Gabe is having a lot of shows to celebrate.

I will be playing with Seeded Plain and DBH this Sunday, October 9th.

Here is the info from the Toledo Bellows Blog

Seeded Plain
Nebraska improvised music duo Seeded Plain performs pieces shaped by the possibilities suggested by the instruments they’ve built, graphic scores, and in response to collaborators. Founded in 2007 by Bryan Day and Jay Kreimer, Seeded Plain has performed throughout the Midwest US and Europe. Their first release ‘Land Tracts’ was released in 2008 to positive critical reviews in North America and Europe. Their upcoming release ’2′ will be available this year on Creative Sources. Seeded Plain is currently working with Nebraska playwright and director Robert Stewart on the soundtrack for his upcoming play Inferno Terra Firma.

D.B.H
Somewhere between broken jazz and drone, DBH is Justin Rhody’s junk-improv act which features him and a revolving cast of characters (who all often play multiple instruments) from Bloomington, IN, its about to get strange (r)

Jason Zeh
Always poised and deliberately patient with his machines, Zeh’s conceptual take on tape music or musique concrete has evolved into more of a aural ,surgical performance, with a kind of blind map of sounds sources feeding into a heart ,or his mixer. Zeh’s drones and pulses, shift and disintegrate, eventually set off course with a meticulous manipulation of his machines functions.


I am going to be performing the new work that I have been trying out live recently. So, if you have been bored of seeing my sets lately, you can come to this one to be bored in an entirely new way.

Ok, here is the newly photographed image for the "Polarity" cassette. I have taken the picture in slightly different light on a more matte finished wall and I like it much better. It is now cropped to fit the dimensions of a cassette cover as well. For the rest of my fall break, I am planning on continuing to edit the tracks for this release.

Milwaukee Noise Fest Write-up

Here is a write-up of the recent Milwaukee Noise Fest. I think that it is a nice introduction to the broad spectrum of aesthetic choices that are often lumped under the "noise" label. One stand-out quote for me describes it as "a music scene that strikes a balance between the deliberate and the unhinged while allowing individual performers to tip that balance toward either extreme."

Here is a video of my set from Voice of the Valley. I Have been trying this set out a lot over the last month and a half. This was the first time performing it live.