March 1, 2007 Snow on the ground, 22 degrees, Port Hadlock WA 5:14AM
I've been very interested in sound since an early age. My father
brought home this little transistor AM radio with a light in it when
we lived in Vernon TX, which would have been late '60's early '70's.
It looked like the light on top of a police car but it didn't turn.
When the radio was on, you could see the guts of it. They didn't do
anything visually but you could see in there. The land was really flat
out there in that part of Texas and you could get what is called
"skip." Stations would come in from all over the country at certain
times of the day and under certain weather conditions. It felt like I
was listening to aliens as I held the radio under the covers with that
weird blue light, wondering how the innards worked. Prior to that
radio, I got my hands on a couple of these really small hand held AM
radios that you would carry around with you. Seems like one of these
little plastic things came from a garage sale. I kind of liked the
sound of it tuned in between stations as much as I liked the stations
themselves. One time I managed to catch the last broadcast of the old
Grand Ol' Opry, where Loretta Lynn was crying and everything. I also
remember the announcement that Jimi Hendrix had died. One time my
brother bought a spy pen radio out of a comic book I believe, and you
could listen to the radio in class with the little mono earpiece.
Later in my childhood, we moved backed to Belton TX, and there was
this friend of one of my older brothers, a Viet Nam vet, that was a
music freak and had a massive LP collection and would make these weird
mix tapes. His philosophy was not to waste any tape with the blank
space you would normally tend to put in between songs, and he would
jam everything together and make edits with two decks and stuff like
this. It was a real cool Art Brut style that he had. Raw vision. I
experimented around this time with overdubbing with two cheap cassette
decks. Later I got my hands on a reel to reel tape machine, which i
still have, from the same guy, and began to crosspatch it where you
could overdub with it and use it as an echo and things like that. My
oldest brother built a little studio type deal on his property where
we began to experiment with recording.
It was a great day for me when, while attending the University of TX
in the early '80's, i figgered out they would let me take a degree in
Audio Production, which basically meant unlimited studio time. (We
later bought the exact machine we had in those courses and made the
second and third Bad Livers records on it. A fine Otari half inch
machine.) They had classes in how mics worked and how EQ worked and
theory and all that. Audio history and the early tape loop editors. I
still use these concepts almost daily, twenty five years later. Much
like in high school, I played tuba in the band for six years and
learned how to read music and follow a conductor. Things I still use
pretty much everyday. Sounds have always freaked me out. Shortwave
radios, oscillators.
Barnyard Electronics is my latest thing. It's all made at home under
conscious lo-fi conditions. In other words, that part of it is
intentional. It's recorded in mono. I keep trying to make a modern up
to date music with my banjo. It's funny that this struggle leads me to
Dada and the noise and experimentalists of the early period of Audio.
I kind of overshot and went back to the Baroque period with the
Purcell prelude. Sometimes the strangest things happen. Moe Hawk is a
nickname for Bill Frisell, and a piece learned from Jenny Scheinman,
the composer, for a duo gig we did in Brooklyn. One time I was riding
around in a rental car with Robbie Fulks and he was talking about
playing on bills with bands where they would dress up like it's the
Louisiana Hayride or somesuch, and he used the phrase "Cornpone Sally
and Her Hay Baling Wagon Wheels." I wrote two pieces of music with
that title and found it an irresistible concept. Harbor of the Nade
(of 6000 Configurations) is a piece from one of my greatest influences
Eyvind Kang. Once Eyvind and I played this piece at a music festival
in Oregon and I sheepishly glanced into the audience and they looked
at us like we had our music upside down on the stand and any minute we
would realize this and flip the parts over and something they would
recognize would ensue a la Victor Borge. It never happened. It sounds
random but it's all meticulously noted. About three quarters of the
way through, you can't help but start laughing uncontrollably at the
absurdity of it all. This is supreme music. Pretty Daughter is a song
I wrote for the first Bad Livers LP, updated and backdated at the same
time. Village Song is from the Microcosmos by Bartok, a fave of mine.
I learned the Monk piece Raise Four from Frisell and we played it on a
tour. Most of the sounds on Barnyard Electronics are a processed
banjo. I grab things with delays and then change the pitch and repeat
them. Sample them and hold. I'm very interested in minimalism and
post-modernism, post-structuralism. It would be cool to be known as
the Morton Feldman or Derek Bailey of the Banjo.
I like static and test tones pretty much as much as i like music. 60
cycle hum. I read somewhere that everything is music if you listen to
it as music. Right now my washing machine is playing a very loopy
beat. The ferry boat to Seattle plays a weird groove if you stand in
front. Dog trots on the kitchen floor. The sound of a banjo as you
change the strings.
I'd like to thank Wayne Horvitz, Bill Frisell, Jenny Scheinman, Darol
Anger, Eyvind Kang, and Greg Leisz for all their inspiration for this
music. What a magnificent thing it is to have heros like that. Folks
that you can run stuff by and you can trust what they have to say.
Heros that you can eat lunch with. I can't imagine what my life would
be like without these people.
I also would like to thank my audience. I'm very blessed to have a
subset of the human condition, that encourages me to seek. I guess
some folks would wonder who in the heck I am and why and what am I
doing and who cares. And some folks have all my work in a special
place on the shelf. I don't know how things could be any better. I
thank God every day that I'm not in a rut. Music is good.
Like a West Virginia coal miner who's hijacked the borer, Danny
Barnes has sunk a musical shaft straight down through the jumbled
strata of modern culture. Those with the ears to see can read the
scratchings on the wall of his syncretic subterranean view of pretty
much the whole damn thing: Our nutball civilization, through a banjo,
darkly.
Danny Barnes seems driven to show us the persistent "old weird
America"* which stubbornly persists, defying modern life, Disney, all
the rest.
-- Darol Anger, 2007
