Hey y'all. I feel weird being the first on the new version of this forum, there was a bunch of interesting stuff here before... Hoping some of it can be reposted.

Anyhows I just watched Danny's old buddy Ralph White play an experimental set and thought it would be of interest here. He did a collaboration with a fella that goes by the name of Hora Flora. His mbiras and banjo were amplified through an assortment of objects instead of a regular PA. Hora Flora had a bunch of tiny speakers and he would balance them on big metal dishes or stack rocks and tin foil and stuff on them. There was a little subwoffer with rocks all over it, or sometimes a plastic bag would be stretched over it. This would either cause the object to resonate with frequencies Ralph was putting out or make crazy distortion. All this stuff was spread out in front of the stage and sometimes even out in the crowd a little bit. It worked in a really cool way with the percussive nature of the instruments. Mbiras typically have a chain or something that lays across the keys to get a rattling sound, and this was a sort of an extension of that, except instead of a little chain or something it was mostly garbage from the modern world that was somewhat frantically being arranged on the fly as Ralph's sounds passed through. Since all this stuff was vibrating it would kinda fall apart at points and Hora Flora would have to run around like a crazy man to keep things balanced or rearrange them. You could tell Ralph was getting a big kick out of it. They did one song with little tape recorders placed all around the room playing a fiddle drone, which was extra cool. They have a CD out together on this label - http://www.resipiscent.com/ - and you can hear some short samples on the site. The first track is binaural, so if you listen on headphones you're plopped down in the middle of all the crazy resonating objects as they're moved around and played with. I think it's a cool CD and an innovative concept in the treatment of traditional sounds. Hooray for folktronics!