January brings sounds from across the Atlantic Ocean to the Maine Seacoast.

  Hey, listen up friends:  Coming up are a few rare chances to catch Wouter Jaspers, Bram Stadhouders, and Bas Verbeek all on tour from Tilburg in Noord Brabant, The Netherlands. For a few exclusive dates around the Eastern Seaboard, including three events this week here in Maine.  Each performing a unique solo improvised sound set, you might hear collages of motors and vocal sounds, infinite reverb drone, classical guitar, words, swoops, and sighs among other things.  Upcomming dates are below.   
  Sunday night January 3rd in 2010, Marc and Dei opened their house to friends to hear sounds and music from these three distant travelers.  They had food and refreshing beverages to share in a pot luck setting.  The food was great tasting, healthy, and satisfying, just right for getting ready for some noise.  People drove in from an hour away on snow covered roads to be in that basement that night.
   Offset Needle Radius combined sounds with Marc Bisson and Dei Xrist of birdorgan.  We ripped and crunched and scraped and wiggled guitar strings, looped SK-1,s droaned dropped vocals and other tongue sounds.  Then Bas Varbeek sat down on the red cloth, lit the candle, and emitted a deep drone from a black Les Paul, beginning softly and rising to fill our minds.  Vocal layers of drone eventually overtook the Les Paul, dominating the thick reverb heavy sound.
   Next was Wouter Jaspers who had performed in 2008 at Ello Gallery in Portsmouth,with Staplerfahrer .  Sitting at the card table strewn with stomp boxes, mixer, laptop, cables, and piles of other things, Jaspers slowly began to interweave tones and textures; a drifting piece incorporating speech, small electric motor radio frequencies, microcassette sounds. 
   Closing the evening was Bram Stadhouders.  He brought out a beautiful classical nylon stringed guitar.  With an internal mic running into an IBook, Verbeek improvised three pieces.  Beginning with subtle foley sounds and then incororating classical runs up and down  the neck.  His playing embraced more of the classical style that has won Verbeek awards at competetions as his set progressed.
   These three artists have traveled far to share their sound visions with us here.  Please get out and see them at one of the upcomming events around the Eastern Seaboard.

17-12 Zebulon – New York, NY
19-12 Pyramid Atlantic - Washington DC
20-12 Robin's Bookstore - Philadelphia, PA
22-12 Ghost Print Gallery - Richmond, VA
23-12 Bobo Gallery - Asheville, NC
26-12 Ed's - Hickory, NC
27-12 TBA - Charlotte, NC
28-12 Badgerhouse - Raleigh, NC
29-12 Nightlight - Chapel Hill, NC
30-12 Garfield Artworks, Pittsburgh, PA
03-01 The House of Goings - Manchester, NH
05-01 Daileyville - Lowell, MA
06-01 South Side Grill - Lewiston, ME
07-01 Memorial Library, Main Street - Livermore Falls, ME
08-01 Strange Maine - Portland, ME
09-01 Buoy Gallery, 2 Government St. - Kittery, ME
10-01 Sunday coma series - New York, NY
11-11 Douglas Street Music Collective, New York, NY.

THe Healing Therapies of Noise

I am by myself at home. It is quiet as I prepare food. Without any thought, a song begins to play in my mind. Perhaps it is by The Eagles, or Eric Clapton. Syrupy canned market research produced crap. As soon as I realize that I am hearing this inside my own mind, I instantly become irritated. A radio I can turn off, unplug, donate to the Salvation Army, throw in the river, torture and ultimately execute. My mind, containing millions of these audio viruses from contagious media sources, I have to live with. The common term for this phenomenon is "EARWORMS". To smother the irritating sounds, I create in my mind a swell of high volumed wide tonal spectrum sweeping noise, like a gigantic industrial sound sweeping machine, whooshes the unwanted viral song into my mental gutter. Guaranteed to crawl back into my consciousness eventually, I am grateful for my imagination, that it can create such a crushing noise to return my mind to peaceful silence. Perhaps this has been a driving inspiration for recent Offset Needle Radius performances consisting of dense feedback and square wave layering noise. One can only wonder...
I have also noticed that when I am confronted by popular music in an instance where I am unable to shut down or remove myself from its broadcast, I tend to change the words, or hum or otherwise vocalize the melody. Admittedly, I also do this with music that pleases me. In both cases, I suggest this is how I enjoy playing with the music that is being broadcast in the space I am inhabiting. In the context of playing this way with music that irritates me, it feels as if I am categorizing the basic elements of the song, breaking it down to focus on the ludicrousity of the material. This feels therapeutic to me and I find that when I am able to play with popular music in this way, it tends not to infect my mind so much and consequently not to invoke negative thoughts.
Years ago I embarked on a mix tape project I titled "Homicide/Suicide". The premise of the tape was to be a collection of all the most infuriating syrupy vapid pop songs I could think of. The happiest, most seemingly perfectly adjusted unchallenging pop songs always seem to conjure images of bloody, violent scenes, terrible thoughts of senseless murder. I've often thought that Sheryl Crow or Edie Brickell would be the perfect auditory backdrop for violent murder scenes in movies. It is as if this music, so perfectly elated and sickeningly sweet, reflecting an impossible reality, must thus be a cover up for terrible guilt, shame, horrible violence and destruction, as an actor who grossly over-acts their part. This range of pop music has such a negative effect on my mental well being that I thought creating the "Homicide/Suicide" mix tape would both serve to over-expose myself and thus hopefully build up my immunity, while examining and sharing for the sake of helping others understand this phenomenon. I never was able to complete the tape.
I hope this admission of my reaction to some popular music won't seem as an affront to friends who may find this sort of music pleasing. I am merely trying to share with readers some of the background that has informed Offset Needle Radius and assuredly all other music endeavors I have ever been a part of. As many of my friends might be allergic to cats and I would not wish to expose them to environments where cats inhabit, I would so request not to be exposed to this sort of music. This is how I am wired. The sounds that I create are a result of this inner circuitry