Miscellany

My friend and web guru Aya suggested this forum and I haven’t been too sure how to get it started. It’s been 42 years now since we recorded No New York and the No Wave scene has been discussed often and quite thoroughly, but at the same time a lot of storytelling has been added and now with distance and some reflection maybe a more accurate picture could be put together, or maybe it’s a question of deconstructing the “myth” and just treating it as a moment in time where quite a few things were happening that in some way were connected. Anybody who feels like it should contribute with their thoughts or questions, and I’ll be adding my own as I work them out. ...

February 7th, 2017 marks 40 years of my onstage career, starting with the first Mars show at CBGB’s on that date in 1977. The first 14 years I spent in New York City and the last 26 in Barcelona. We have set up this site and blog to house archives of all my past projects and ongoing documentation of my current ones. We are still in process and will be adding archive material and updating regularly. As I’ve chosen a .cat domain, for Catalonia, I’m going to make an effort to get things translated into Catalan, but this will take some time. Special thanks to my blog angel in this adventure, Aya Yoshida, an old friend who convinced me to do it in the first place, and has done all the design and setup so I could concentrate on organising the material and writing. ...

…like Herb Alpert waking up in a spaceship… When he improvises, alternating between long, sonorous proclamations and agitated tonguing and smears, Cunningham sounds close to Don Cherry… Wire 225 Convolution’s noirer-than-noir trumpet, voice and effects thing is loaded with subtle menace. Cunningham and partner Silvia Mestres are on to something darkly magical. Time Out New York …deeply distorted guitar, breathy vocals, trumpet, synth. Sounds like: balloon animals mid-contortion, Latin Jazz, rainy island nights locked inside of a haunted house, and the hot & cold soundtrack to an ever-morphing poetry book. ...

I grew up in Tenafly, New Jersey, a residential suburb across the river from Manhattan. Started playing trumpet in the school band as a kid, marching at football games or parades in fall and spring, and playing classical greatest hits in school auditoriums in the winter. But it was in my early teens that I really discovered music, listening on a small transistor radio to mid sixties pop hits and on an old tube short wave set to all the strange sounds between stations that seemed from outer space. I took up guitar then and learned enough to play covers in a garage band that never got out of the garage, and for awhile lost interest in the horn. Things really went to another level when I got old enough to go into the city on my own, from ‘68 to ‘70 going to as many as concerts as I could afford at the Fillmore East or hallucinating on light shows at the Electric Circus. Naively I thought I’d opened my head up about as far as I could at the time. ...