Artist: Chas Smith
Genre(s):
New Age
Discography:
An Hour Out Of Desert Center
Year: 2003
Tracks: 4
Composer, performing artist, and instrument designer Chas Smith (innate 1948, Hardwick, MA) has appeared on rafts of feature article cinema tons, rock music, jazz, and blues albums playing pedal steel guitar and organ, simply since the nineties he concentrates on his impressive metallic well-grounded sculptures. Following in Harry Partch's footsteps, he builds his possess instruments, structures that tail be stricken or arciform in various places, and writes for them. He is an acolyte of Rick Cox, Michael Jon Fink, and Jim Fox, all revolving around the label Cold Blue. His music, eerie soundscapes both assuasive and haunting, can be heard on Nikko Wolverine (2000) and Aluminum Overcast (2001).
Smith's mother was the church organist for the First Congregational Church, so he went through forte-piano lessons starting at the age of eight. He got his first taste of the electric guitar when he heard Link Wray's "Rumble" on American Bandstand and at geezerhood 14 dropped the forte-piano.
The guitarist started to play in a few rock & seethe bands and even played Hammond B3 organ on pornography motion-picture show soundtracks in the early '70s, just he had higher aspirations. Smith enrolled at Berklee Music School in Boston as a pianist to study jazz composition just dropped extinct in front complementary his number 1 year. A couple old age by and by, after auditory sense Morton Subotnik's "Silver medal Apples of the Moon," he left his native New England and stirred to California to give ear CalArts, where the composer was pedagogy. He as well studied in private with Mel Powell, James Tenney, Earl Brown, and Harold Budd (he played on the latter's The Room and Serpent in Quicksilver). He gradational in 1975 and accomplished his M.F.A. in music composition in 1977. Soon he began to do pedal point sword guitar on various cinema loads, an activity that would suit more and more authoritative for him during the late '80s and '90s (he appeared on American Beauty and The Shawshank Redemption, to list only two). He as well became a regular phallus of John Trubee & the Ugly Janitors of America and Tokyo 77, spell conducive to dozens of albums, including some by Neil Mooney, Ethan James, and Carol Caroompas (he even recorded a session with toughie bikers the Pagans).
In the mid-'70s, Smith began to ferment as a professional welder and machinist. His first experimentations in instrument design date from that full stop, even though he had been modifying his guitars since the '60s. A large gong made of al tubes set to 45 tones to the octave was used on his number one uncut release Nakadai (1987). Still, it took him some time to schoolmaster this aspect of his artistic sight. The first of his dilate structures, the Bass Tweed, was completed in 1993 and place together from junk metal pieces. From that point on Smith focused his activities around his sculptures, devoting to them two albums on Cold Blue in the early 2000s.
