Analog dreams, reed spells, and a plant on piano—Week 6 bends voltage into feeling.

The Modular Cowboy is Week 5 of Vintage Astronaut’s Sonic Explorations Residency, a fully improvised live session blending modular synthesizers, experimental jazz, ambient textures, and surreal sonic storytelling. Featuring live modular synth, saxophones, guitar, drums, and electronic bass, this performance captures the essence of spontaneous music-making in a vibrant, plant-filled venue in Winston-Salem, NC. Listen, subscribe, and support the full session archive at www.vintageastronaut.com.

Week 4 of the Sonic Explorations Residency features a spacious trio set with Jonathan Greene, Joseph Dowdy, and John Daniel Ray, joined by houseplant Phoebe on PlantWave synth during a special second set collaboration. Titled Gas Giant Super-Leviathan, this session explores deep textures, playful improvisation, and ambient resonance in a room full of plants and possibilities.

Week 3 of the residency, Plants in Your Eyes, featured a packed room, deep improvisation, plant-generated soundscapes, and a killer band coming together for the first time. Visual artist Daniel Fox Johnston captured the whole session with live effects and prisms—watch the video and feel the energy on the session site.

Our second installment of the weekly Sonic Exploration Residency featured an all-star alignment of cosmic collaborators. We were joined by the incomparable Michael Anderson on keyboards and synthesizers—a wizard of music, a modern-day Bach whose improvisations seem to flow directly from a higher harmonic dimension. Jonathan Greene returned to bend time with his drums, and Joseph Dowdy painted the air with saxophone and flute. John Daniel Ray navigated the low-frequency continuum with bass, electronics, and computers. Though the neighboring terrestrials once again summoned the law in protest of our volume (three times, for those counting), we countered with a series of beautifully hushed improvisations, whispering our way through the void. The venue’s plants—stoic, leafy, and highly attuned to vibe—swayed gently in approval and joined us in the jam. All in all, a lovely evening under the influence of benevolent sky creatures, both seen and unseen.

This album captures Week 1 of Vintage Astronaut’s residency at Easy Tiger Beer Garden in Winston-Salem, NC, kicking off our Weekly Explorations sessions with some bold musical adventures. The goal of this session is to create something new, to improvise with computers and analog synths, and to create something beautiful - a portrait of this moment in time. We don't play any covers, only improvisation and some original compositions. The session was so killing, even the cops showed up to shut us down early—proof that the music was definitely hitting all the right frequencies.