by Brad Rose

Well, I'm not a "trained" musician in even a vague sense of the word.. I can't read music or anything like that. Growing up I had always found myself tuning out the lyrics of the songs I heard and focusing on the music, so I guess it makes sense that I would end up playing music. The only member of my family that was a musician was my Great-Grandfather who played Mandolin. I was in high school when I got my first guitar and started playing music with one of my best friends, we both started around the same time. I can remember the first time we sat down and instead of trying to figure out how to play a song we'd heard, we had an all-out jam, all improvised, everything fell into place and... it was overwhelming, no feeling like that in the world. I think I still have a recording of it among my boxes of old cassettes. Just about everything original that we played together from the beginning was kind of quirky and not at all like anything we'd ever heard at that point. After high school this same friend had moved away to go to college and I found myself delving deeper into more experimental sounds and gathering all sorts of instruments. I bought a MiniDisc recorder and would spend hours driving around day and night gathering field recordings.

One of the first albums that blew me away was "Philip Glass - Two Pages / Contrary Motion / Music in Fifths / Music in Similar Motion". This was around the time when I had first started playing music and most of what I was hearing on the radio or whatnot all sounded pretty much the same to me, so if you're familiar with this album you can understand that I was very, very excited to hear it. That album opened the doors for me to finding a lot of great stuff -Steve Reich, Kronos Quartet, John Zorn, Terry Riley, Mike Oldfield... The list goes on and on. Prior to that I would scout out second-hand stores for old records. I found a bunch of stuff on Winham Hill... George Winston, Michael Hedges, William Ackerman, et al.

More recently much of what I listen to is from other artists such as myself, usually trading CDs through mail. There are so many fantastic people out there.

Most everything before that was just a few cassette tapes or CDRs that really just circulated between family and friends. The quality of the recording equipment I had at the time was fairly disappointing... Lots of sibilance before "Sibilance" you could say..

Yeah I was surprised, absolutely. When I first put the album together, the owner of the company I had just started working for was into experimental music so I gave him a cd. After listening to it he asked if I had ever had any airplay. I laughed a bit because I thought he was joking, but when I realized he wasn't he suggested I send a copy to WFMU, which I hadn't heard of at the time. I didn't expect much at all when I mailed it out, but in no time I had my airplay and Brian Turner @ WFMU replied to me and said I should send a copy to aQuarius, because "they'll dig it". I guess they did "dig it", and they asked if I would do a proper release of it for them to carry. Proper release in this case was just creating some cover art, listing the sounds, and burning a few more discs.

It's definitely a story. Could almost be an autobiography too I guess. The interesting thing is that it actually feels like a story to anyone besides myself, I took that novel comment in your review as the highest compliment because that was part of the intention. That said, there were equal parts composition and post-production. It wasn't until around the middle-point when the entire story came to light while I was creating it though.

The inspiration for the project came about as I was sitting in my basement with all of my recordings and instruments. I had a lot on my mind, and was unemployed at the time. Thinking about life and memories and listening to recordings. I came to notice that there were certain parts in my recordings that brought back the feelings/emotions that I had at the time it was recorded. It was pretty surreal actually, and it was only certain parts... never the entire recordings. Anyway, I started trying to figure out how to actually do it on purpose. How to create something that I could listen to after the fact and feel that same way. This is how the combination of composition and post-production came to be. The whole project too an obscene amount of time to complete. I would go out of my way to find specific places where the sounds fit with the feeling, and use those as part of the project. A few times it took weeks to find places with specific feelings to accompany them. Within Sibilance there are mixed feelings/emotions. All of them are apparent to me, and I am grateful that at least some of them are apparent to others. Feelings ranging from the dark and foreboding sounds of industrial machinery that we as humans never see but are dependent on... The suspense of standing next to a railroad seeing a train barreling towards you... The feeling of the summer breeze on your face, and the rush you feel when you realize that the birds are singing to the song you are playing on your guitar. It's all in there, and more.

I responded to a post on the local college radio stations forum a few years ago. I think they were looking for miscellaneous sound clips to use.. The post said something akin to "Sound Art" or "Sound Sculpture". Through that I had gotten in touch with a local (who I'm now good friends with) who, along with his wife runs a small record label called Magnanimous Records. Mostly releasing ambient/experimental music by local musicians. Great folks. They wanted to re-release Sibilance, so I added some other material I had been working on that was along the same lines (following etc.) as well as some... shall we say "bookmarks" for some of the chapters of the story. Magnanimous Records released a follow-up album of mine this year as well, entitled "Helioipause03"

Ahh yes, the 17-year periodical cicadas... "Magicicada Septendecim".. ..."Brood X" to be exact. Fantastic creatures. I spent all of my free time during the summer of 2004 collecting recordings of these guys with the MiniDisc recorder I owned at the time. I had been anticipating their emergence for a couple of years prior to it actually happening. I remember when this same brood emerged in 1987, I was only 7 or 8 at the time, and the fascination I had for them as a child still remains. I was fortunate enough to find an individual who had some high-quality recordings of the same exact brood from the 1987 emergence, and we traded some stuff. I have since made a set of these recordings freely available on the internet archive (check it out HERE -ed).

The cicadas inspired me (still do) in so many ways. The biggest is the fact that they live underground not seeing the light of day for 17 years, then emerge, shed their skin to grow wings and spend one season above ground before dying. One of natures many tales of transformation and changes I guess. Naturally the kind of thing that inspires me to create and reflect on such things.

As far as approaching the music differently, sometimes yes sometimes no... There's more room for improvising and building off of each others ideas while creating music together versus solo. A lot of our music that we had done before we met was eerily similar, so we were both on the same page from the start. I've built of more confidence from having created so much music with my wife, thats one of the major things. I've also naturally built off of our collective ideas in my solo stuff as well. For instance I have been doing more with piano recently, as well as focusing more on atmospheric/textural/soundscape stuff. Both of which I had done in the past, but never truly focused on to the extent that I have my other material.

Music and photography are tied close with me. They both represent different ways of expressing similar feelings/ideas. With music it is a little more interactive, but at the same time photography can express in one instant what it might take an entire album of music to express. I tend to approach them in similar ways too, expression-wise. But there's always something I may see or feel that I can't express any other way than a photograph, or a piece of music for that matter. Sadly I have been neglecting my cameras recently and been more focused on other things. Not to mention the fact that I still have probably 20 rolls of film that I've taken over the past however many years that I have never bothered to develop... Perhaps that will be the first step in getting back into that mindset.

Recently I have been doing a lot of improvisational guitar stuff with a good friend of mine Craig Main, whom I met through my wife a few years ago. We both hit it off right away with our playing styles, but never really had enough time or motivation to really hone those skills until this year. We also both draw inspiration from our surroundings, so most of our recordings are made at interesting places like abandoned buildings, forests, etc. Currently we are trying to get an album together for MYMWLY.

The self-titled "Barn Owl" release you did struck me, particularly in that it has the same feel of a lot of stuff we have been creating recently. Great stuff. I've also been quite fond of the side-projects of the "Natural Snow Buildings" folks: "Isengrind" & "TwinSisterMoon". Other notable ones would be "Sir Richard Bishop - Polytheistic Fragments", "Rafael Anton Irisarri - Daydreaming", and just about every disc from your "Bottled Smoke" series. The list goes on and on, too much to try to run through.