Week 4: Gas Giant Super-Leviathan
Live at Easy Tiger Beer Garden, Winston-Salem, NC
Week four of the Sonic Explorations Residency found us drifting through wide, spacious terrain—open textures, thoughtful pacing, and sonic discoveries unfolding in real time. This week’s trio featured Jonathan Greene on drums, Joseph Dowdy on tenor, alto, and soprano saxophones, flute, and effects, and myself, John Daniel Ray, on bass, synthesizers, and computer-driven sound. Playing as a trio for the first time in the series gave us all room to stretch—Joseph dove deep into his effects palette, and I explored synthesizer sounds I haven’t touched yet on this residency.
The vibe in the room was magic—Easy Tiger had just added new curtains and lighting, which made the space feel even more alive and sonically dialed in. Plants hung overhead and lined the walls like ambient collaborators.
As always, the plants were part of the music. I connected our resident pathos plant Phoebe to a PlantWave, letting her generate musical signals during setbreak and again live with the trio during the second set. You can learn more about that project at www.floraphonics.com. The piece we played with Phoebe was unplanned and beautiful, like she was truly waking from a strange dream.
We named this session Gas Giant Super-Leviathan in honor of the massive, drifting, unknowable creature we conjured in sound—and the deep gravity we felt improvising together in orbit.
Track titles for this week are fragments of the experience:
Phoebe wakes from a strange dream, Mycorrhizal Extension, The Endemic Exoflora Taxonomist, At the Speed of Plants, and Living to Eleventy, among others—musical snapshots from a night of full exploration.
