Shameless self-promotion.

Dunno if the three people who read me here also read my other blog, so I’ll put in a quick plug for the exciting action goin’ on over there.

Today I posted the results of a project that I think is hot shit, even if no one else seems to agree:

Given a batch of 70-year-old home recordings of my grandfather playing piano, I digitally edited, treated and reassembled them into a series of nine short ambient/experimental/avant-garde song-things.

These have been posted to Bandcamp as a choose-your-own-price download called Hope’s Treat.

If you wanna read the long but reasonably entertaining story behind Hope’s Treat, click here.

If you’d like to skip the long story and give a cursory six-second listen to two or three of the songs, you can click here instead.

If you’d rather not be bothered, and would prefer to go out for fried chicken instead, that’s a third option.

Choose wisely.

(I suggest spicy fries on the side. You gotta sin to get saved.)

From the Valley: Kurt Blumenau, “In The City Of Churches And Cannons.”

Another in my intermittent series of posts about online releases by Lehigh Valley-based performers.

I am proud to announce the release of the finest avant-garde free-jazz experimental diddley-bow album of 2014.

At least so far.

Regular visitors to this blog have already learned to dread my periodic stabs at diddley-bow playing (and “stabs” indeed seems like le mot juste, doesn’t it?)

Up to now I’ve confined myself to covering the most treacly hits of the Seventies. But that wasn’t good enough. I decided I needed to go farther out.

So what we have on In The City Of Churches And Cannons are five distorted, raucous, wandering, whinnying, semi-sorta-tonal diddley bow solo performances.

It’s not quite the Metal Machine Music of diddley bows — though I might have that in me yet; don’t count me out.

But some of it reminds me distantly of someone like Albert Ayler, or of the noises Jerry Garcia used to wring out of his guitar when the Dead would go really, really out. So I labeled it “avant-garde” and “free jazz” and “experimental” on Bandcamp, and here as well. Each label sorta seemed to fit in its own way.

Most people will probably settle for labeling it “shit.” But, who knows? There might be a couple madmen out there who enjoy listening to these noises as much as I enjoyed making them.

For them, I am only too glad to perform a public service.

In The City Of Churches And Cannons is available as a name-your-price Bandcamp download here.

Turn it up. And enjoy.