‘merica – Six billion dollars and a politically wasted year later Americans reaffirmed they are a nation divided to the core. Wednesday brought sudden silence after the months long onslaught of blaring impersonality. The electorate has chosen and hundreds of campaigners from idealistic students to career politicos and advisers are once again out of a job as hemorrhaging war chests suddenly coagulated.
Salt City – A red door beckoned through the murky city night, plastic hoops revolving through the storefront glass. Composed vibrations filtered through brick whilst a steady trickle of students, appreciators and fans donated their entry fee.
Green printed Lincolns allowed admittance to white walls covered in contributed works surrounding a table strewn with ceramics. Managed and supported by Syracuse Continue reading
Illadelphia – Cloud spotted sunshine beckoned southward. A $40 ticket from craigslist and a rare day off coincided in a parking garage adjacent to the Delaware River Sunday 
afternoon. Street parking problematic, paying for rented space saved worry while vouching for a free beer from an overtly rude barkeep.
Syracuse – Undaunted by a mid afternoon deluge, hundreds made their way to James Pass Arboretum near Burnett Park for the 6th annual Tipperary Hill Music Festival. Bringing together an assortment of local musicians across three stages, the family friendly event hosted area food and craft vendors for attendees with the help of sponsors. Continue reading
Lucky Lake Campground – Whilst the enigmatic culture swirling about Black Rock Desert’s Burning Man continues confounding outsiders, denizens of America’s Great Lakes gathered to share and celebrate the event’s ideals at a venue closer to home.
Driving through the darkness dodged traffic Continue reading
‘merica – Flash! Middle America from Texas to the Northeast is currently being pounded for the second time in a month from a type of storm that has gained notoriety due to wide scale destruction. Derechos are defined as “a widespread, long-lived wind storm that is associated with a band of rapidly moving showers or thunderstorms. Although a derecho can produce destruction similar to that of tornadoes, the damage typically is directed in one direction along a relatively straight swath” 1 by the National Weather Service. The recent spat of storms led to page updates five times in the last month.
An old Iroquois trail appropriated and expanded by westward looking Americans as the
19th century began, the Old Seneca Turnpike runs along Syracuse’s southern border. Following State Route 173 east out of Onondaga Hollow toward the former farming villages beyond, a fraction of nature’s majesty was preserved for the city’s future denizens.
Lying between part of man’s modern highway system and the original trail that spanned the state, Clark Reservation makes up 315 acres of outskirt between city and suburbia.
Making headlines through the barrage of Republican primary monotony (lovingly dubbed “endless suffrage” by John Stewart) and health care deliberations, the opening salvos were fired in what will most likely become a protracted budget scuffle on Capitol Hill. The federal government continues operating through stopgap measures. The latest was reached just before Christmas, averting a government shut down and allowing the nation’s deficit deepening policy to function through the remainder of the 2012 fiscal year. It was the fifth such last minute agreement of 2011.
A wintry January evening reunited friends who began their songwriting journeys together. Jazz Central, a 78 seat theater owned and operated by Central New York’s Jazz Arts Foundation, hosted the trio of musicians getting together to play their songs while sharing the stories behind them.
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This review was written for and originally published by
Upstate Soundscape
a radio show on 91.3 WBNY out of Buffalo, NY
bringing you the best in experimental sounds cooked up across New York
Tribal glitchwave with a broad scope, The Busride EP is an excellent offering of “post-elevator music” from Steve Goodwin and Zeek Barnett, who create the exhibits of Skeleton Zoo from Albany, New York. Taking part in the reinvention of the beat generation a half century later, their digital concoctions exemplify the global fusion taking place across most genres of music as the twenty-first century marches on.
Skeleton Zoo’s electronic collages reflect the measured madness of society’s impositions. This dizzying spin through the arrayed skeletons of our present civil constructs opens with simple African percussion. The Busride quickly climbs into gear as the journey begins, belching distortion and barely intelligible utterings amid the chaotic tribal musings of “Nelson Mandela.”
Gurgling overtones built atop harmonic repetition provide the stage for a flurry of samplings spanning humanity’s exhibition. Dreamy glitchwave builds the ambiance, allowing hazy glimpses of half-remembered moments to drift across consciousness before receding once again. Whispered words and scratchy rhymes smoothly flit about the painfully soulful reminder that “time will heal.”
Passengers exchange the ride for a stroll through the nonsensical dreamscape of Willy Wonka. Echoing rhythms built around Gene Wilder’s half-mad crooning spurs the listener onward through shimmering walls of resonance. Into the chaotic “Colorless Dystopia” of our future, sonic accoutrements of the past left behind in the face of memory. Whizzing through the wasteland left behind by excess, a blurred world helps make everything a little clearer, xylophone firing into silence.
Returned to the present, we find the bus rolling through frozen expanses of electronic orchestration. “Snowdrifts” shift, whisked into new configurations, the road behind quickly swallowed up by the drifting accumulation. Fuzzy murmurs and a single string, the path suddenly shining as the guides veer eastward through the pastures of the Skeleton Zoo.
