Opposite People, the Traffic Jam, the Hanging Chads

This band shapeshifts names, members, and genres

Specialists in playing outdoor and community gigs

Wake Up the Earth Festival, Jamaica Pond Lantern Parade, Spontaneous Celebrations Winter Carnival, Prospect Hill Block Party, Hyde Park Farmer’s Market, Egleston Square Main Streets…

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This project was initially developed during my residency as Artist In Research at the Berwick Research Institute.

It is being published by ASPECT: The Chronicle of New Media Art in Volume 16: Low-Tech.

Audio commentary by Wayne Marshall of wayneandwax.com and presently Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT.

Shrine to the Funky Drummer is an experimental video documentary that seeks to portray a specific instance of media sampling as an archetypal cultural moment and a lens through which to examine a multifaceted story of creative appropriation.  The ‘Funky Drummer’ is a five-second excerpt from a James Brown song that has been used as the foundation of hundreds of other musical compositions and is one of popular music’s most famous samples. For this project I gathered and created artifacts and ‘holy relics’ that explore the early history of Hip Hop and the creative acts of sampling and remixing. The video examines debates about copyright and fair use in relation to Afro-Diasporic musical notions of “versioning,” the fetishistic culture of record-digging, and postmodern theoretical questions about authorship in the age of digital (re)production.

The funky 11-piece juggernaut is back this summer!

I’ve been chosen as an Artist In Research at the Berwick Research Institute for this spring.

Here’s what the press release says:

Update: My Berwick project blog can be found here if you’d like to follow along.

A collection of musical compositions created over the last year or so under my solo moniker Avocado Kid.

Each song can be thought of as a soundtrack to a distinct imaginary world. As most of them are quite brief, I conceive of them as miniature themes, conjuring the essential impression of a scene and story.

The instruments I play on these tracks include electric and upright bass, drum kit, guitars, electric piano and organ, violin, bamboo saxophone, trombone, synthesizers, drum machines, african and latin percussion, melodica, voice.