Week 11: Journey to the Center of the Sun
Live at Easy Tiger Beer Garden, Winston-Salem, NC
This week we strapped in for a heatwave of improvisation—fully fueled by audience prompts, analog voltage, and the chaotic wisdom of weasels. The trio this week featured Jonathan Greene on drums, Joseph Dowdy on saxophones and flute, and Ryan Hsu on modular synthesizer, with me (John Daniel Ray) wrangling the ideas, setlists, and audio chaos from the helm.
The night’s musical journey was shaped by audience-supplied prompts ranging from the abstract (Purple, Tree Speed, A Portrait of Tim) to the cinematic (Butterfly Nebula, Dance of the Womposaur) to the borderline operatic:
An army of weasels attacks a pet store to liberate the captive animals. A battalion of mall cops on segways defends the storefront. The weasels win, but just barely—there were far too many mall cops.
Somehow we played that. And it made sense.
We also summoned an impression of American Gothic, and composed a piece in honor of the great conspiracy: Jewish Space Lasers—because art should respond to the absurdity of the world with beauty, humor, and maybe just enough honesty to make people tilt their heads.
A tropical plant named Isodore joined us once again via PlantWave, this time singing through a Roland Juno synth in one of the most fragile and strange pieces of the night.
Everything was improvised. Nothing was repeated. This is what happens when you trust a room full of humans, wires, air, and curiosity.
Explore the archive and keep listening:
