Cover art

Coming Soon! Live @ Soap

There is a great little art space in San francisco called the Soap Gallery. http://riversoap.com/soap-gallery/index.htm

Run by Eve and Lisa Mendelson they present the works of local artists

Eschew has performed for several of their monthly art openings and I must say that they are fun. People come for the art and conversation so the room gets to be quite loud. My music is geared to add to the excitement.

I try to absorb the vibe and theme of the art as the night proceeds. Part of my gear I bring to the gallery is my trusty Burnit CD recorder. Many hours of live recordings have come from this and I am sitting up late nights listening and culling tracks for a Live @ Soap project.

Look for this soon on this site. The beauty of working in this way is that no one is impatient with the length of the tune. Long morphs are possible. My sets are often three hours long. Lets just say repetition is inevitable. Lucky for me, as a human being, circular experience is desired in our musical mind. Swirls and twirls in our brains are the result of the mental musical eggbeater that is Eschew.

Eschew, the Band

What is eschew? Is it better than toast? Will being eschewed hurt? These are all questions for which I can only answer, sometimes there is and there is not. Eschew is my band of one. I play guitar and record my parts on the fly so I can make layered sound scapes. This is done with Roland music technology. I thank them and honor them. The sound pallet I use is familiar and the music is homemade. I do not bring a laptop full of arrangements to the gig so the effect is like listening to tracks being built at a recording session.
The eschewing takes place as I move through the rolls played by different band members. I have been in bands and enjoy working with musicians. Writing for a band is a process which is fraught with the politics of group dynamics. You have to share. You have to play well with others. A one man bands still requires discipline. I have to tell my bass playing self to play fewer notes, turn down and not drink all the beer. I have to get the keyboards to not cover everyone's part, and of course the lead guitar is so full of himself he never shuts up. This the dynamic of band life.
Some of you I have played music with may feel eschewed. I pay tribute to you. I could use some help hauling in the pa. The reason for it all is of course is the freedom to experiment with the arrangement. Finding parts and putting them together without having to having to document them to hear how it will work is my reason I love the looper. I just lay it out there and then if it fits, I go with it and then try something new. This is improvising. It is cheap, and it is low-fi.

Why play with a bar?

Playing slide guitar is to playing guitar what ice skating is to walking in comfortable shoes.
Fretted instruments are more likely to be in in tune. Leaving the frets becomes a delicate balancing act, slipping between self expression and skreech. The bar you hold to make the notes can turn your fingers into hulk hands. So why bother playing slide? Because just as the skater's form is suddenly free from gravity, the slide player's notes glide up and out of pitches with a sustain that some of us find electrifying.