All proceeds to go to Texas Equal Access Fund: teafund.org

Spaced roughly 3 months apart, but feeling a significant mite closer, these improvisations are some choice artifacts of North Texas’s persistently strange improvised music scene. Alternately spooky and ethereal, or naked and primitive, they create a sonic space all their own, without the context afforded by the tiny, intimate, and familiar social settings they were created in. Full disclosure: I (usually) hate, or perhaps, less harshly, do not prefer the term "non-idiomatic". Not because it is devoid of any meaning, mind you. But, in the world of improv, it has accumulated a glut of implied or inferred meaning through its usage and association through the years. Sarah, Ernesto and I did not discuss what was to go down sonically on either of these dates. All three of us had played together, in various combinations, with or without other performers a number of times before, but these two performances were the only two times we had been brought together in this particular combination. We each know each other's idiomatic spread; the depths and limitations of each other's artistic vocabularies. Frankly, we are all a bit busy, artistically and otherwise, so by the time each of these nights was upon us, we converged without any blueprint, save for our prior relationships, as artists and as friends. This was not so much intentional as much as what life threw at us; three eccentric and excited artists, bringing the joy and immediacy of improvised music to a dive bar, and a house, in a metropolitan area that, to many, seems like a most unexpected place for a creative music scene. The fact is, the metropolitan area in question, that of Dallas/Fort Worth/Denton in North Texas, in recent years, against many cultural odds, has become a hotbed of creative cross-pollination and unexpected artistic pioneering. On a weekly basis, in the last decade especially, creative musicians have been putting on shows and series' which defy the tendency to separate the great players and young provocateurs into rigid and predictable scenes. In this D/FW/D artistic hot zone, you have ambient music, free jazz, no wave, psychedelic rock, hip-hop, performance and body art, modern dance, electo-acoustic improv and more, rubbing elbows and bumping heads. Mostly, the people are very hungry for this exchange. They are listening to each other. Most importantly, they are playing with each other, refusing to be pigeonholed or stereotyped. It is within this context that the fire and flavor of this special trio's impromptu creations emerged into life, brightly or darkly, naked and unashamed. At the beginning of both of these performances I was uncertain, unwell, and ready to be done with it. By the end of both of them, I felt healed. I am thankful to my two beautiful friends in the strange music for the chance to bring these sonic creations to life out of the primordial sonic aethers swirling about our heads. I hope these sound pictures will be as healing to you, the audience, as they were for me.
—Aaron Gonzalez