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Contributor Leah Ottman

On December 2, 2020 we lost our friend and local music fixture, Leah Ottman. Keston and I went back-and-forth on how to address this in this era of impersonal social media transactions. It’s still doesn’t totally feel right or in a weird way, even appropriate on this platform, but as we talked, our intention is to share a little bit of our personal interaction with Leah in the hopes of bringing peace and solace to those who knew her. This recording was centered around Leah and I preparing for a performance with the Merce Cunningham dance company at the Walker art center in 2017.

I was also able to spend some time with Leah on the road with rogue valley a number of times, as well as some shows with coloring time, and Leah’s improvisation series called Disco Nap. I always remember thinking, Leah is such a fun person to hang out with and also…where the hell is Leah, because of her tendency to just disappear for a bit.

Anyway, I have some very fond personal memories and a sad heart around what could’ve been, from this young and beautiful beautiful soul.

Much love to all who are mourning
Cody and Keston

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a sound/simulacra album now available

One of the last concerts I played before the COVID-19 pandemic and the horrific murder of George Floyd was a sound/simulacra with an amazing group of artists including: Cody McKinney (electric bass, voice, electronics), myself (Rhodes, synth, electronics), Aby Wolf (voice, electronics), Kaleena Miller (amplified tap dancing), and Nathan Hanson (saxophones). The venue made a multitrack recording of our show, so since have been unable to continue with our monthly series, Cody Mckinney and I decided to release a live album of music from the evening. Cody wrote an elegant essay (below) about the night, and I mixed and mastered the recordings which are now available on Bandcamp (above). All sales will be directed to advance the Black Lives Matter movement. Please read on to learn more about the album and the artists who made it possible.
sound/simulacra started as a monthly experiment, conceived by myself (Cody McKinney) and my dear friend and collaborator, John C.S. Keston. The name comes from the writings of Jean Baudrillard, the great French, post structuralist philosopher. The basic idea was to bring sound artists / musicians together from varying disciplines, and see if we could find some universal truths within the framework of improvisation. Many differing sound disciplines seem to have their own language and systems of improvisation. Many of these take a lifetime of study to master, but that is usually based on that discipline’s improvisatory syntax as opposed to the purer language of sound. There was no attempt to try to learn or master other artists’ vocabulary, but rather to seek the commonalities between performers and their systems. Many times, these improvisations revealed certain formal structures; for example, western music theory influence, with our scales and triads and harmonic rules. While other times, they revealed behaviors from the natural world such as bird songs, or moaning, or machinery. [In recent times, we’ve begun to align our lives with many machines, and with that alignment comes a whole host of familiar sounds, structures, forms etc.] Continue reading “a sound/simulacra album now available”