Hala Strana | |
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Origin | Los Angeles, California |
Genres | |
Years active | 2002–2007 |
Labels | Jewelled Antler, Emperor Jones, Soft Abuse, Music Fellowship, Worstward Recordings |
Hala Strana is the name of a recording project of American musician Steven R. Smith. Smith began recording under the name in 2002 as an outlet which allowed him to explore the traditional music of Eastern Europe more fully than possible with his solo work. [1] Although numerous musicians have contributed to the project, including Glenn Donaldson, Loren Chasse, and Darren Ankenman, most Hala Strana recordings are solo productions. His recordings have included such diverse instruments as hurdy-gurdy, bouzouki, harmonium, spike fiddles, bulbul tarang, the optigan keyboard, xaphoon, and field recordings. Hala Strana's releases have featured arrangements of traditional music from Hungary, Romania, Croatia, Albania, Ukraine and Bulgaria as well as original music influenced by the music of these areas. Hala Strana has recorded for a number of independent labels such as Soft Abuse, Last Visible Dog, Jewelled Antler, and Emperor Jones.
Snog is a band that was formed by Australian musician David Thrussell, along with fellow art school friends Tim McGrath and Julia Bourke in 1989. The band's music is a fusion of many different styles, including industrial, techno, ambient, experimental, funk and country music. The band name is a reference to "kissing and cuddling".
Final is a project of English musician Justin Broadrick, creator of the band Godflesh, which he started when he was 13 years old. Unlike Godflesh, Final is primarily electronic in nature, taking on a space-like, dark ambient sound.
Kevin Drumm is an experimental musician based in Chicago, United States.
Chris Cutler is an English percussionist, composer, lyricist and music theorist. Best known for his work with English avant-rock group Henry Cow, Cutler was also a member and drummer of other bands, including Art Bears, News from Babel, Pere Ubu and (briefly) Gong/Mothergong. He has collaborated with many musicians and groups, including Fred Frith, Lindsay Cooper, Zeena Parkins, Peter Blegvad, Telectu and The Residents, and has appeared on over 100 recordings. Cutler's career spans over four decades and he still performs actively throughout the world.
Rick White is a Canadian musician and singer-songwriter. Born in Moncton, New Brunswick, he was a member of indie bands Eric's Trip, Elevator, Perplexus, and The Unintended. White first played music, in a band called "Bloodstain", in 1984, before starting his own band "in 1986", called "T.C.I.B", which later transitioned into the band name, "The Underdogs", which lasted from the summer of 1987, until June 1988. By the summer of 1989, The Underdogs had broken up, and Rick had joined another band, "The Forest", which lasted from the 1989, until June 1990, with a one-off recording session happening in December, 1990. Prior to Eric's Trip, and while in Eric's Trip, White also recorded two solo-produced albums, one in March 1990, and another in August 1991, but both were not released until 2022. Known for lo-fi recording, he has also recorded and produced music for The Sadies, Orange Glass, Joel Plaskett, One Hundred Dollars, Dog Day, HotKid and his former Eric's Trip bandmate Julie Doiron.
Stephen O'Malley is an American guitarist, producer, composer, and visual artist from Seattle, Washington, who has conceptualized and participated in numerous drone metal, doom metal, and experimental music bands, most notably Sunn O))).
Richard Youngs is an English musician based in Glasgow since the early 1990s. His catalogue of solo and collaborative work formally begins with Advent, first issued in 1990. He plays many instruments, most commonly choosing the guitar, but he has been known to use other instruments including the shakuhachi, accordion, theremin, dulcimer, a home-made synthesizer and even a motorway bridge. He also released an album which was entirely a cappella.
Jewelled Antler is an American musical collective created in 1999 by Loren Chasse and Glenn Donaldson as an extension of their work in the organic drone folk-noise group Thuja. The idea was to release handmade CD-R's of various solo and collaborative projects and one-off bands, encompassing drones, songs, electroacoustic sound manipulation, and field recordings. Jewelled Antler is perhaps best known for its "Nature Psych" or "Outdoor Folk", in which whole albums are recorded "in the field" and/or incorporate field recordings and the sounds of nature. Indeed, besides a wide range of traditional and exotic stringed things and low-tech electronic equipment, some of the "instruments" on their albums include pine cones, creeks, branches and crude harps built from fallen trees.
Ashtray Navigations is an English experimental music group centred upon Phil Todd and active since 1991. Colloquially referred to as "Ash Nav", the group operates out of Todd's home in Stoke-on-Trent, from which he also ran the record labels Betley Welcomes Careful Drivers and, subsequently, Memoirs of an Aesthete. The project has also released music through labels such as Siltbreeze, Jewelled Antler, American Tapes, Fargone Records, Menlo Park, E.F. Tapes and Freedom From.
Steven R. Smith is an American musician, instrument-builder, and printmaker often associated with the Jewelled Antler collective. Born in Fullerton, California and based in San Francisco and, more recently, Los Angeles, he has been musically active since the mid-1990s. His main instrument is guitar, both acoustic and electric, although other instruments, including the hurdy-gurdy, bouzouki, fretted spike fiddles, and assorted ethnic instruments, have been incorporated into his work.
Knurl is the noise music project of Canadian experimental composer Alan Bloor. Based in Quebec, the composer has been performing and recording as Knurl since 1994, the year of project's seminal harsh noise release "Initial Shock."
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Hush Arbors is the primary musical project of American musician singer/songwriter/guitarist Keith Wood. His music uses traditional folk merged with elements of country and psychedelic music. Along with releasing solo material Wood is also a current member of Chelsea Light Moving. He has toured with and worked with musicians including Current 93, Six Organs of Admittance, Sunburned Hand of the Man, Jack Rose, Wooden Wand and Voice of the Seven Woods.
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Scott Tuma is a musician from Chicago who is best known for his live performances and also for having played guitar in the pioneering alt-country band Souled American. Since his departure from Souled American in the late 1990s Tuma has released numerous solo albums, performed and recorded with Chicago's Boxhead Ensemble, and collaborated with members of the band Zelienople in a project dubbed Good Stuff House.
Chie Mukai is a female Japanese composer and musician, best known for her underground improv-folk group Ché-SHIZU. She has been involved in improvised performance since 1975, when she participated in the East Bionic Symphonia group, a graduation project for students of Takehisa Kosugi at the Bigakko art school in Tokyo. Her primary instrument is the bowed Chinese er-hu, although she is also a vocalist, and plays piano and percussion. Every year she organizes the Perspective Emotion mixed media arts festival in Tokyo. She has been frequently collaborating with Kenya Kawaguchi, Masayoshi Urabe, Seiichi Yamamoto since 2010.
Fursaxa is a United States–based psychedelic folk or freak folk project led by Tara Burke of Pennsylvania. Her home-recordings feature acoustic guitar, simple Casio electronic keyboards, accordion, dulcimer and her heavily overdubbed vocals on a 4-track recorder.
Aidan Baker is an electronic musician from Toronto, Ontario, Canada who has released numerous records both as a solo artist and as part of various side projects, including Nadja, ARC, Caudal and Mnemosyne. He has also written several books of poetry.
Alan Courtis is an Argentine musician, artist, composer and sound artist. He studied classical guitar, piano, theory and composition. He holds a degree in Communication Science from the University of Buenos Aires, where he currently runs an annual music workshop. He played electric guitar in diverse bands and in 1993 he co-founded the group Reynols. With this group he has released more than one hundred CDs and vinyls worldwide in labels like Trente Oiseaux, Digital Narcis, Drone Records, Locust, Sedimental, Beta-Lactam Ring Records, Celebrate Psi Phenomenon, RRR, Audiobot Records, Roaratorio, JDK, Reverse, Matching Head, American Tapes, Last Visible Dog, Carbon Records, Mikroton, etc.
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