Poster for 3/13/11
Dan from Moral Crayfish will be sitting in w/ Lettuce Prey
Saturday, March 12, 2011
Friday, September 03, 2010
Gear Interview for QDR
Find all about my incompetant guitar playing/gear in this interview I did for QDR.
See Link Below:
Dan Cohoon Gear Interview
Sunday, December 27, 2009
MORAL CRAYFISH: Go to Church & the Crooked Shoe
This live album documents the collaboration between Dan Cohoon on prepared guitar & Scott Verrastro on percussion. It was recorded @ the First Unitarian Church in Philadelphia on 9/09/09 by Scott Slimm & @ the Crooked Shoe on 11/03/09 by Steve Sanford.
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Sunday, November 01, 2009
Layne Garrett
Layne Garrett works with found objects, found sounds, guitars, and self-built instruments. Recorded output ranges from assemblage-drenched Americana to a new CD of improvisations on guitar and prepared guitar; a disc of improvised duos (with Scott Allison, Christian Brady, Ryan Jewell, Janel Leppin, Sam Lohman, Anthony Pirog, and Jenny Tucker) is on the way shortly on Sockets Records. Solo performances have lately hovered in the heady realm of improvised explorations on buzzed-out prepared resonator guitar and homemade light-sensitive electronics. Other recent activities include: organizing a large-scale tape-loop intervention in Rock Creek Park (Washington DC), hosting shows at the Lighthouse in DC, and completing several construction projects, including a version of Glenn Branca's harmonics guitar, a set of hanging car-metal gongs in the shape of a map of the USA, and a large freestanding playable structure about which a collaborator said: "man i would really love to play that big baby for 12 hours straight it is obviously a meditation key."
Scott Allison
Scott Allison is a member of Philly/DC improv psych-noise unit Kohoutek, and an independent sound artist in his own right. He works with field recordings, tapes, junk electronics, toy electronics, your mother's keyboard, and all of it with great taste.
Moral Crayfish
Moral Crayfish is Dan Cohoon and who ever he can sucker in playing with. Moral Crayfish was the name of his sister’s imaginary rock band when she was in college. Brothers Dan & John Cohoon stole the name from her when they entered the battle of the bands in high school. They had discovered that by duct-taping a headphone to the body of their younger sister’s viola and plugging it into the mic jack of a boom box they could get distortion and feedback. They also discovered how to “multi-track” by connecting various boom boxes and audio devices together. The brothers started taping over their parents’ collection of Sermons from their former church, the Alliance Bible Church, in San Antonio to make noise tapes. At this time the brothers had little or no knowledge of avant-garde or underground music. It was with joy and a little disappointment when they first heard the works of such artists as Sonic Youth, Dead C, and Richard Youngs on college radio shows from WVUD & WPRB. It was exciting because these artists were pursuing similar sonic explorations; disappointing because they were not doing anything all that new. In college a friend gave Dan Cohoon a Sears’s electric guitar that survived a house fire, complete with plastic flowers & 90210 stickers on it. One of the conditions of keeping the guitar was that he was not allowed to remove the stickers. By that time in college he had become interested in the work of John Cage, especially his work with prepared piano. Dan Cohoon started applying the techniques Cage used for his prepared piano on his guitar. He would shove metal and wooden objects into the guitar strings. Using the feedback of the guitar to move the objects would cause a loop. The feedback would cause the objects to move, and the movement would make a sound which would cause the objects to move again. When Dan Cohoon saw Dean Roberts play with his band White Winged Moth his style of guitar playing changed again. Dean Roberts would use a screw driver to twirl against the strings and the body of the guitar. When he adopted his style of playing he learned that you could have a great deal of control with a wider variety of sound possibilities.
Hex Nine
Hex Nine is a collaborative project between DJX-5000, a keyboard(ist), Maybeth Chew, a bassist, and Justin Duerr, a guitarist and singer. The band came together in the winter of 2007 after Maybeth's band Bad News Bats stopped playing. Justin and Marybeth experimented with several approaches, before settling on DJX-5000 as their keyboard(ist), and began (de)composing quasi-songs. Hex Nine currently have one outdated demo CD-R titled 'Dial HEX-9, as well as more recent CD-R titled 'in Mystic Emerald Sea'. Justin is a part of other musical projects such as Northern Liberties, Geb The Great Cackler, Vivian Girls Experience, and others. Both Marybeth and Justin also make visual art. This will be the ninth Hex Nine show.
Jesse Kudler
Jesse Kudler, born 1979, improvises on cheap consumer devices: a no-name electric guitar, hand-held cassette recorders, radios and transmitters, various small junk, and pedals/electronics. He uses a computer to assemble his recorded music. Kudler's work often operates on the extremes of volume, demonstrating an interest in the subtleties that can arise from intense softness or loudness, and it is marked by special attention to the stereo field. Recent interest has focused on both internal (electronic/radio) and external (microphone/speaker) feedback. Beyond simply exploring non-pitched sounds, Kudler investigates their use in creating improvised structure. Kudler attended public school until Wesleyan University, where he studied music with Ron Kuivila, Alvin Lucier, and a little bit with Anthony Braxton, among others. In his various travels, Kudler has performed with Matt Bauder, Kyle Bruckmann, Chris Cogburn, James Coleman, Tim Feeney, Marcos Fernandes, Margarida Garcia, Brent Gutzeit, Horse Sinister, Bonnie Jones, Newton, Pauline Oliveros, Bhob Rainey, Vic Rawlings, Christine Sehnaoui, Mike Shiflet, Jason Soliday, Howard Stelzer, Christian Weber, Barry Weisblat, Ellen Weller, Matt Weston, Jack Wright, Jason Zeh, and many others. He has toured the United States several times. Jesse Kudler lives in Philadelphia. Current and recent projects include: HZL, an environmental electronics duo with Tim Albro; a duo with Ian Fraser; Tweeter, a treble-intensive noise trio with Alex Nagle and Eli Litwin; Benito Cereno (with Dustin Hurt, Chandan Narayan, Tim Albro, and Ian Fraser); duos with Chris Cogburn and Christian Weber; solo performance and recording; and various ad hoc groupings.
Ian Fraser
Ian M Fraser (b.1980) is an artist working both visually and aurally. In high school, he focused on the alto saxophone at the School For Creative and Performing Arts in Cincinnati, Ohio, studying jazz, improvisation and music theory. Now, he plays bass for Philadelphia-based rock group Arc in Round. He has also taken to improvise with various ad hoc groups using computer and electronics. A few of these projects include Common Sense, a duo with Tim Albro (12-string guitar/electronics) as well as Benito Cereno, a quintet with Mr. Albro, Dustin Hurt (cornet), Chandan Narayan (extended autoharp), and Jesse Kudler (tabletop guitar/electronics). Other hobbies include photography, collage, and bird watching.
*All sets will be solos or duos, and will be 15-20 minutes each.
The Crooked Shoe
4500 Kingsessing Ave., Philadelphia PA
$5 / All ages/BYOB
Saturday, August 08, 2009
9/09/09 First Unitarian Church
TINY MIX TAPE REVIEW:Moral Crayfish, first in the lineup, is the recording project of Philadelphia’s Dan Cohoon, whose haunted guitar-drones were, on this night, accompanied by the free-percussion of Scott Verrastro, with whom he had never previously played. Cohoon built up a colossal wall of doom but allowed wraithlike shimmers to sneak through and softly cry. Verrastro’s bow-to-cymbal technique, gong-hits and bell-clangs provided a Silvester Anfang-esque, funeral-procession vibe that pushed the screeching guitar spirits out through the cracks around the edges of the windows and ceilings of the chapel. (Tiny Mix Tapes) (Elliott Sharp)
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Monday, December 01, 2008
MORAL CRAYFISH: Gadolinite
Much like the mineral Gadolinite, which the latest Moral Crayfish album is named after, this album is a dark dense brooding affair. This album marks Dan Cohoon’s third time to participating in the National Solo Album Month contest, which happens every November. All Sounds produced were made using prepared/ unprepared guitar, hand percussion, thrift shop snare drum, Yamaha DX-100 keyboard, Christmas tree watering device used as a horn, bells, violin, thumb harp, harmonica and various other house hold objects. These sounds were then manipulated and layered on a laptop to create the dense sonic environments.You can stream or download the entire album here.
Salinas * Gadolinite * Dodrans * Caganer
Hets * Nagaraja * Mara
Shabnama * Weneg
Hets * Nagaraja * Mara
Shabnama * Weneg
Links:
Sunday, November 09, 2008
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Wednesday, October 01, 2008
MORAL CRAYFISH @ The Fire 10/21/08
You can down load a live recording of Moral Crayfish's set at The Fire in Philadelphia, recorded on 10/21/08. You can down load the entire set for free here. 
Tuesday, June 03, 2008
MORAL CRAYFISH @ the Knitting Factory
Moral Crayfish was honored to be offered a chance to play at the Knitting Factory for the podcast Country Feedback. It was my first live appearance in five years. 
It was recorded by Jeffory Simmons and edited by my self, Dan Cohoon. All sounds on the recording were produced using a prepared guitar and effect pedals. You can down load the entire performance for free here.
MWVM: Rotations Remixed
Moral Crayfish is pleased to be included on the compilation of sound artists remixing the work of mwvm, the moniker for british guitarist Michael Walton.
You can download the entire disc for free
See Link Below:
http://www.archive.org/details/silber066-mwvm-rotations-remixed
Silber Records released mwvm's debut album rotations in the fall of 2007 & now we are pleased to give you a collection of remixes & reworkings from some close friends. The remixes include a shimmering mass of complex jarring textures by the mighty Astral Social Club, pulsing layers of precision amplitude modulationfrom Sonicslice, & Zac Keiller doing an alt-country cover version of context.
MORAL CRAYFISH: I am fully aware of my own unreality
Moral Crayfish (cover art)
This album was recorded in the month of November, 2007 for the National Record a Solo Album Month. It deals with a missadventure by Dan Cohoon involving a certain town on the north shore of Massachusetts. [Hints: It is the town north of Witch City USA (a town making profit off of the massacre of women for over 250 years); it is where the people who killed all witches actually lived; John Updike lives there; Julia Childs liked to frequent a bad Chinese restaurant just north of the town; it is the town that birthed the American Navy (unless you talk to the folks in Marblehead); it is known to some as the Garden City.] All sounds made by Dan Cohoon using prepared guitar (electric and acoustic), pot lids, chop sticks, hand drum, harmonica, violin, snare drum, maracas, Yamaha DX-100, Casio CT-K 330, Hondo II, Washburn, toy keyboards and various other implements of clatter.
If you you prefer the physical object you can get it via PayPal for $5.00
MORAL CRAYFISH: Month of the Dog
Rumpus Records from Norway has put out out Moral Crayfish’s latest offering Month of the Dog. The album was produced for the NaSoAlMo contest, the goal to record an entire album in the month of November. 
The song titles for the disc were arrived at using a chance operation that involved the random article button on Wikipedia. Moral Crayfish has previously released various CD-Rs including, If you build it, we will burn it. and Catastrophic Success.
(Contact: Rumpus Records c/o Steinar Stensen Nötteberget 127500, Stjördal NORWAY)
Silber on Silber
Moral Crayfish was honored to be included in the Silber on Silber compilation. Silber Records is a great label from North Carolina. Their motto is “Drone, Love, Honesty, Sound.” The Silber on Silber compilation features Silber artist & allies covering various other Silber artists. Moral Crayfish remixed Rollerball's “Girls Hugging Trees.”
Silber Sounds of Christmas
Moral Crayfish was one of the 24 artists to contribute a song to Silber Recordings’ Christmas compilation Silber Sounds of Christmas. Moral Crayfish contributed a track entitled, “He was disturbed & all of Jerusalem with him.” The following is a list of all the artist who contributed to the compilation: Origami Tacet, immune, Rachel Goldstar, Siberia, living in photographs, Small Life Form, Electric Bird Noise, The Zanzibar Snails, Plumerai, Remora, Sailor Winters, Shiny Around the Edges, Peter Aldrich, Wrong Brothers, Bokor, 230 divisadero, Moral Crayfish, South West Airline, recorded home, Remora, Duane Pitre/Pilotram, Mars Field, Goddakk vs JM, Blessed Child Opera, My Ambient Nature Girl, The Wades, The Torch Marauder featuring Matt Westlake & The Upsidedown Stars.You can purchase a copy of Silber Sounds of Christmas here or download it for free here.
MORAL CRAYFISH: Catastrophic Success
All sounds made by Dan Cohoon using prepared guitar, screwdrivers, chopsticks, dowel rods, bells and various other household objects. This E.P. is less dependent on prepared guitar than previous work. Most of the sounds were produced using everyday objects that were then manipulated on the computer. It was recorded from Summer of 2005-Winter 2006 in Glen Mills, PA. It was mastered by Jacob Anderson @ Tape Mountain HQ.
Moral Crayfish: Catastrophic Success 
Moral Crayfish: Catastrophic Success The name Catastrophic Success comes from one of the many brilliant mis-statements our dear leader has made in regards to Iraq. A reporter asked what he thought of the situation in Iraq. George W. Bush replied that it was a “Catastrophic Success!” Well, he got it half right.
Underseas * Hypnotheoretical * I’m the Decider
Catastrophic Success * Misunderestimate * Make the Pie Higher
MORAL CRAYFISH: We did not do it, but we dug it!
All sounds created by Dan Cohoon using prepared guitar, plastic water bottles, glass cups, music box, Casio CTK-330, metal bowl, AM radio static, photographic flash, coins, screwdrivers, metal flashing & various other household objects.
Moral Crayfish: We did not do it, but we dug it!
Recorded in the summer & fall of 2004 in Glen Mills, Pennsylvania
Mastered by Mini-Wagonwheel in Portland, Oregon in the winter of 2005
The quote, “We did not do it, but we dug it,” originated in the documentary The Weather Underground. It is what a hippy girl said after the Weathermen bombed the United States Capital Building.
Thursday, March 23, 2006
Press
TINY MIX TAPE REVIEW 9/09/09:
Moral Crayfish, first in the lineup, is the recording project of Philadelphia’s Dan Cohoon, whose haunted guitar-drones were, on this night, accompanied by the free-percussion of Scott Verrastro, with whom he had never previously played. Cohoon built up a colossal wall of doom but allowed wraithlike shimmers to sneak through and softly cry. Verrastro’s bow-to-cymbal technique, gong-hits and bell-clangs provided a Silvester Anfang-esque, funeral-procession vibe that pushed the screeching guitar spirits out through the cracks around the edges of the windows and ceilings of the chapel. (Tiny Mix Tapes) (Elliott Sharp)
Moral Crayfish's I am fully aware of my own unreality. (5/08)
Moral Crayfish, first in the lineup, is the recording project of Philadelphia’s Dan Cohoon, whose haunted guitar-drones were, on this night, accompanied by the free-percussion of Scott Verrastro, with whom he had never previously played. Cohoon built up a colossal wall of doom but allowed wraithlike shimmers to sneak through and softly cry. Verrastro’s bow-to-cymbal technique, gong-hits and bell-clangs provided a Silvester Anfang-esque, funeral-procession vibe that pushed the screeching guitar spirits out through the cracks around the edges of the windows and ceilings of the chapel. (Tiny Mix Tapes) (Elliott Sharp)
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Terrascope UK reviewsMoral Crayfish's I am fully aware of my own unreality. (5/08)
See Review Below:
Recorded in November 2007 for the National Record a solo Album Month, the experimental soundscapes of "I Am Fully Aware Of My Own Unreality" - Moral Crayfish are both disturbing and engaging, the harsh scraping and rattling softened occasionally by chimes and swelling washes of noise. As the album progresses it becomes both denser and tenser, the highly unsettling "Witches on Cop Cars" being a fine example of sonic paranoia, whilst closing track "Limpy Barker No Longer Roams Cabot Street" is a metallic drone with a coating of rusty noise, the end result creeping under the skin with unforgiving purpose.(http://www.myspace.com/fieldtheoryrecordings)
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Terrascope On-line review of MORAL CRAYFISH: Month of the Dog
See Review Below:
The beginning of Rumbles for March 2007 found me in the good company of Cageian scholar Dan Cohoon’s Moral Crayfish, so to maintain a semblance of continuity, it seems only right to open this splurge with the follow-up to his self-released ‘Catastrophic Success’ 3 inch CDR. ‘The Month of the Dog’ was produced for the NaSoAlmo contest, which required an entire LP to be recorded in the month of November. Instead of relying on President Bush’s shorted-out electric head for titles, this release, his first for another label, employs randomly selected, although equally puzzling, headings from the online encyclopaedia, Wikipedia.
Using roughly the same sound sources as before (prepped guitar, violin and household knick-knacks), those once free-falling noise pixels have, with richer production values, found themselves forming into more ordered and in some cases more unsettling shapes. ‘Euthalia Nais’ is a good example of this development, as the faux railway goods yard backgrounds present a vast backdrop against a bank of zithered longstring textures. Echo units play an important role this time round too, especially in ‘Lato Regia’ and the nightmarish ‘Asopus’ where obscured / unearthly sighs are found leaking from its laptop-adjusted surroundings.
And the further we head into this collection, the darker things become – the closing tracks, the aptly named ‘Broom Filefish’ and ‘Camarophillus, inhabit a peculiar undersea dronescape which is as claustrophobic as it is strangely compulsive. (Rumpus Records, Notteberg 12, 7500 Stjordol, Norway http://www.rumpus.no/ or Moral Crayfish, PO Box 171, Glen Mills PA 19342 USA http://www.moralcrayfish.blogspot.com/ )
See Review Below:
The beginning of Rumbles for March 2007 found me in the good company of Cageian scholar Dan Cohoon’s Moral Crayfish, so to maintain a semblance of continuity, it seems only right to open this splurge with the follow-up to his self-released ‘Catastrophic Success’ 3 inch CDR. ‘The Month of the Dog’ was produced for the NaSoAlmo contest, which required an entire LP to be recorded in the month of November. Instead of relying on President Bush’s shorted-out electric head for titles, this release, his first for another label, employs randomly selected, although equally puzzling, headings from the online encyclopaedia, Wikipedia.
Using roughly the same sound sources as before (prepped guitar, violin and household knick-knacks), those once free-falling noise pixels have, with richer production values, found themselves forming into more ordered and in some cases more unsettling shapes. ‘Euthalia Nais’ is a good example of this development, as the faux railway goods yard backgrounds present a vast backdrop against a bank of zithered longstring textures. Echo units play an important role this time round too, especially in ‘Lato Regia’ and the nightmarish ‘Asopus’ where obscured / unearthly sighs are found leaking from its laptop-adjusted surroundings.
And the further we head into this collection, the darker things become – the closing tracks, the aptly named ‘Broom Filefish’ and ‘Camarophillus, inhabit a peculiar undersea dronescape which is as claustrophobic as it is strangely compulsive. (Rumpus Records, Notteberg 12, 7500 Stjordol, Norway http://www.rumpus.no/ or Moral Crayfish, PO Box 171, Glen Mills PA 19342 USA http://www.moralcrayfish.blogspot.com/ )
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Moral Crayfish is Dan Cohoon and whoever else he happens to rope into the process. On Catastrophic Success it doesn't appear that anyone else has felt the taste of the rope, but hey - that's OK. Using guitars and stuff he finds around the house, Cohoon creates a web of sound that rattles around as well as the bones in anyone's closet. Broken into six tracks, the material ranges from what sound like tape splice experiments, to random clots of little instruments ganging up on strings. It's a thoughtful, funny-sounding exploration of various electroacoustic theories, done up with all the panache one guy's bedroom can muster.
(Byron Coley) (The Wire)
(Byron Coley) (The Wire)
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Moral Crayfish Interview
conducted by Jim Ebenhoh via e-mail
Jim Ebenhoh: Who is Moral Crayfish?
Dan Cohoon: Moral Crayfish is basically me, and whoever I play with at the time.
JE: When did Moral Crayfish start, and how has it progressed over the years?
DC: The name “Moral Crayfish” was my sister’s imaginary rock band name when she was in college. My brother and I stole the name when we entered the battle of the bands in high school at West Chester East High School in PA. At that time my brother John and I were making sound pieces by recording over tapes of sermons from the Alliance Bible Church (our former church in San Antonio, Texas). The first tape piece consisted of distorted classical musical samples, distorted violin recorded to tape deck via a headphone mic and a sample of Thurston from a bootleg Sonic Youth disc asking, “Are you into the groove?” I am sure this confused the football jocks, cheerleaders and field hockey players who were judging the competition. We were not asked to play.
In college at Montserrat College of Art I did an independent study in sound. I basically did it as an excuse to play with the schools four track recorder. My advisor suggested that it would probably be cheaper if I just bought the equipment rather than paying tuition. I was always more interested in playing with technology than concerning my self with assignments. The sound from that era consisted of me using samples from the old sermon noise tapes I made in high school, field recordings of my family, along with my own primitive guitar and piano playing.
In college I had a second musical project called Moniker. This was a live improvisation-only project. The rules of Moniker were simple. Rule #1: you can not practice with the person you are playing with before the show. Rule #2: it is better if you don’t play the instrument at all between shows. Rule #3: Continue playing until at least half the audience leaves. We imagined it to be like John Zorn’s Cobra but for extremely lazy people. Moniker played three times. The project stopped because it became harder and harder to follow the third rule….the audiences began to stay for our performances.
At the turn of the century I moved out to Portland, Oregon where I started playing my first real shows. I played several ad-hoc improvisational shows at a hippie-run pizza joint It’s A Beautiful Pizza. I also played with more rock orientated bands… I ran the Amplitude Music Series, for my zine Amplitude Equals One Over Frequency Squared, which featured such artists as Hochenkeit, The Holy Ghost, Celesteville, The Exposition of Light, Amy Annelle, & Solo Dos En Tijuana.
JE: What releases has Moral Crayfish done?
DC: I feel for you, but I can not find you (dead-fish tapes) 1997
It could be worse, it could be you (self released) 1999
Pain’s Temporary Glory (un-released) 1999
If you build it, we will burn it. (nilla cat) 2002
We did not do it, but we dug it! (self-released 2005)
JE: How would you describe the Moral Crayfish sound?
DC: I hope that it sounds organic. I use prepared guitar, various household objects manipulated to make appealing and evocative sound environments.
JE: How do you "prepare" guitar?
DC: The way I prepare a guitar is I shove metal or wooden objects, under and through the guitar strings. I then use other objects such as metal tubes, screwdrivers to vibrate the strings either through rubbing, plucking, twirling, or hitting. Prepared guitar playing comes out of the tradition of John Cage who would insert objects into a piano to alter its sound for his chance operation pieces. I also owe a deep debt to Dean Roberts (a New Zealand guitarist) who I first saw use a screw driver to activate the strings of his guitar. I later learned about Keith Rowe’s style of table top guitar playing which I adopted for awhile.
JE: What is your recording technology of choice?
DC: My technology of choice is any technology I can get my hands on. When I started out I did not have an amplifier so I duct-taped headphones to an acoustic guitar and fed it through a mic jack of a boom box and then connected that boom box to a second boom box to get a distorted guitar sound.
I recorded a whole disc using a Sanyo boom box and a third tape deck. With the Sanyo boom box you can play two tapes at once so you can “multi-track” dumping it to a third tape deck. Using three tapes in constant rotation you can build up a denser and denser sound.
I have used more traditional recording technology such as four tracks and computers. I love the over modulated sound quality you can get with four-tracks. I like using computer based recording technology because the ease of editing and manipulating sound files. I am not making pristine recordings so the whole idea of analog vs. digital is not that important to me. My main concern that whatever technology I am using that I use it to its maximum effect.
JE: What are your favorite instruments to record with?
DC: I mainly use prepared guitar. I love the infinite possibilities you can achieve using just wood, wire and metal. I also love using a piano. I am totally untrained, but if there is a piano in the room, I can’t help but play on it.
JE: What would you say to critics who suggest that most of your music is "unlistenable", or at least "unhealthy"?
DC: I would definitely say that my earliest work could be categorized as such. Moniker’s goal was to get a visceral reaction from the audience. Moral Crayfish has always been more abstract. With Moral Crayfish I am interested in creating a fascinating sound environment. I have always found things such as feedback pleasing. My goal is not to make something that sounds unpleasant….that is very easy to do. I genuinely find the sound of detuned guitar feedback, metal scraping against strings very interesting and pleasant.
JE: You are also a visual artist and photographer. Are there parallels or linkages between your visual work and your audio output? DC: I think there are parallels between my visual and audio work. In both I am not interested in perfection. I do not want my work to be seen as precious or sentimental. Making a perfect print or musical piece is not honest, nor is it interesting. I like finding success in failure; whether it is an out-of-focus negative that somehow holds together to make an engaging print or a sound piece that uses discordant elements to make a cohesive whole.
JE: Tell us a bit about your collaborative effort "Taken Girls"
DC: The Taken Girls are Jacob Anderson on guitar, Eric Matchett on percussion and myself on prepared guitar. Jacob is in countless bands including Celesteville and Gang Wizard. I first saw Jake at a Celesteville show in the basement of a hippie pizza joint where he did a heartfelt cover of Iron Maiden and then threw his shoe at his guitar. I met Eric and his wife on the bus ride home from a noise show in North Portland that we both attended. Both Jacob and I share a great fondness of obscure New Zealand music from the late 1980s and early 1990s. Eric and I knew each other because we both like to attend Free Jazz shows around Portland. When Jake and I advertised for a drummer for our new project, Eric was the first to reply. Jake is probably one of the best musicians I have played with. He has a great ear and a plethora of guitar pedals and other noise making devices to play with. Eric’s style of drumming does not draw attention to it self, but it is always spot on. With the Taken Girls we hope to combine our mutal love of droney, murky Xpressway style rock with free improvisation. The Taken Girls should have a new EP called “Easier Than Hope” out shortly on Tape Mountain.
JE: Has Moral Crayfish ever played live? What about Taken Girls? What has been your favorite Moral Crayfish or Taken Girls live performance? The worst?
DC: Moral Crayfish and the Taken Girls have both played live. My favorite Moral Crayfish show was at a speak-easy called Disjecta in Portland, Oregon. Each performer was set up in a semi-circle and each performer had 5-10 minutes to play a set solo. The time limit was the perfect amount so one could explore a theme, with out becoming over indulgent. My favorite Taken Girls show was a live set we played on KPSU at Portland State University. I think it was amongst the best stuff we ever put to tape. Both the worst Moral Crayfish show and Taken Girls show was when I became despondent on stage on two separate occasions and decided to break all the strings on my guitar.
JE: What's been your favorite band to see live?
DC: By far Bardo Pond is my favorite band to see live. They have an ability to alter your whole being totally through their music alone. I have had several near religious, almost out of body experiences while watching them play. Their music is all about beauty hidden beneath gobs of transcendent sonic sludge.
JE: Is it true that you were in a Portland band called Montgomery Park? What was that about?
DC: Montgomery Park was a band that was all about toy instruments and malfunctioning recording devices. I played with this lovely couple Jim Ebenhoh & Kelly Joseph (perhaps you know them?) who were from Cambridge, MA. They moved out to Portland a few weeks before I did in the summer of 1999. Kelly, who is originally from New Zealand and attended Montserrat with me, and her hubby Jim, who is originally from Ohio, attended grad school at faire Harvard. We met because of my photograph of Alastair Galbraith that was hanging up at a local coffee shop in Beverly, MA. Alastair was a local musician from Dunedin, NZ the town that Kelly and Jim lived in prior moving back to the states.
Montgomery Park was named after an old office building in Northwest Portland that had a great neon sign on top. With Montgomery Park we attempted to have a naïve approach to music using toy instruments, beer bottles (sometimes with disastrous results) and various other household objects. If we only had a drum machine we could have beaten the Animal Collective to the punch.
JE: Who are the friendliest musicians you know? Does friendliness help or hinder good music-making?
DC: It would be a close tie between Bardo Pond and Rollerball. Both those band make excellent music as well as being excellent human beings. Being friendly can only help in making good music. There are plenty of artists who make great music but are assholes (I won’t name names). It is always disappointing when an artist you like turns out to be a jerk.
JE: Name five records that have most influenced Moral Crayfish's sound.
DC: Lou Reed: Metal Machine Music
White Winged Moth: Ribbon Arcade
Bardo Pond: Bufo Alvarius
Dead C: Clyma Est Mort
Glen Branca: Symphony No. 2
JE: Name five records that you love but which sound completely unlike Moral Crayfish.
DC: Neil Young & Crazy Horse: Arc/Weld
Dinosaur Jr: You’re Living all Over Me
Pavement: Westing by Musket & Sexton
Bob Dylan: Street Legal
Palace: Days in the Wake
JE: Is Moral Crayfish political? Is there a message behind "We Did Not Do It, but We Dug It"?
DC: I don’t see how anyone could not be political when the fascist Bush Régime has been destroying our democracy for the last five years. I would not say that Moral Crayfish are overtly political in the sound pieces. I have used several slogans that I stole from various radical movements to name a few Moral Crayfish releases.
The quote “We did not do it, but we dug it!” was the funniest line in the Weather Underground documentary about the radical group from the 1960’s the Weathermen. After a bombing at the U.S. Capital building a hippie girl states, “We didn’t do it, but we dug it!” I love the quote because it can be applied to any action that you approve of.
I released an EP on Nillacat, Mini-Wagonwheel’s CD-R label called “If You Build It, We Will Burn It.” I got that quote from an Earth Liberation Front action when they burned down a ski resort. They spray painted that slogan on the sides of the buildings they burned. While I would not take part in the destruction of private property, I loved the simple and direct message of that slogan. There are no overt political messages in the sound pieces themselves I just like using borrowed texts to name both my musical enterprises as well as my art work.
JE:What have you been working on lately?
DC: I have completed an as yet untitled E.P. It is less dependent on the guitar for sound. It is mostly manipulated sounds of everyday house hold objects such as glass & plastic bottles, chopsticks, bells, wood, and screw drivers
JE: What record label should sign Moral Crayfish?
DC: Well if Xpressway still existed I guess it would be nice to get signed by them…. Siltbreeze just started up again, which is the label the most closely shares my own aesthetics.
Links:
Moral Crayfish
Nilla Cat
Tape Mountain
conducted by Jim Ebenhoh via e-mail
Jim Ebenhoh: Who is Moral Crayfish?
Dan Cohoon: Moral Crayfish is basically me, and whoever I play with at the time.
JE: When did Moral Crayfish start, and how has it progressed over the years?
DC: The name “Moral Crayfish” was my sister’s imaginary rock band name when she was in college. My brother and I stole the name when we entered the battle of the bands in high school at West Chester East High School in PA. At that time my brother John and I were making sound pieces by recording over tapes of sermons from the Alliance Bible Church (our former church in San Antonio, Texas). The first tape piece consisted of distorted classical musical samples, distorted violin recorded to tape deck via a headphone mic and a sample of Thurston from a bootleg Sonic Youth disc asking, “Are you into the groove?” I am sure this confused the football jocks, cheerleaders and field hockey players who were judging the competition. We were not asked to play.
In college at Montserrat College of Art I did an independent study in sound. I basically did it as an excuse to play with the schools four track recorder. My advisor suggested that it would probably be cheaper if I just bought the equipment rather than paying tuition. I was always more interested in playing with technology than concerning my self with assignments. The sound from that era consisted of me using samples from the old sermon noise tapes I made in high school, field recordings of my family, along with my own primitive guitar and piano playing.
In college I had a second musical project called Moniker. This was a live improvisation-only project. The rules of Moniker were simple. Rule #1: you can not practice with the person you are playing with before the show. Rule #2: it is better if you don’t play the instrument at all between shows. Rule #3: Continue playing until at least half the audience leaves. We imagined it to be like John Zorn’s Cobra but for extremely lazy people. Moniker played three times. The project stopped because it became harder and harder to follow the third rule….the audiences began to stay for our performances.
At the turn of the century I moved out to Portland, Oregon where I started playing my first real shows. I played several ad-hoc improvisational shows at a hippie-run pizza joint It’s A Beautiful Pizza. I also played with more rock orientated bands… I ran the Amplitude Music Series, for my zine Amplitude Equals One Over Frequency Squared, which featured such artists as Hochenkeit, The Holy Ghost, Celesteville, The Exposition of Light, Amy Annelle, & Solo Dos En Tijuana.
JE: What releases has Moral Crayfish done?
DC: I feel for you, but I can not find you (dead-fish tapes) 1997
It could be worse, it could be you (self released) 1999
Pain’s Temporary Glory (un-released) 1999
If you build it, we will burn it. (nilla cat) 2002
We did not do it, but we dug it! (self-released 2005)
JE: How would you describe the Moral Crayfish sound?
DC: I hope that it sounds organic. I use prepared guitar, various household objects manipulated to make appealing and evocative sound environments.
JE: How do you "prepare" guitar?
DC: The way I prepare a guitar is I shove metal or wooden objects, under and through the guitar strings. I then use other objects such as metal tubes, screwdrivers to vibrate the strings either through rubbing, plucking, twirling, or hitting. Prepared guitar playing comes out of the tradition of John Cage who would insert objects into a piano to alter its sound for his chance operation pieces. I also owe a deep debt to Dean Roberts (a New Zealand guitarist) who I first saw use a screw driver to activate the strings of his guitar. I later learned about Keith Rowe’s style of table top guitar playing which I adopted for awhile.
JE: What is your recording technology of choice?
DC: My technology of choice is any technology I can get my hands on. When I started out I did not have an amplifier so I duct-taped headphones to an acoustic guitar and fed it through a mic jack of a boom box and then connected that boom box to a second boom box to get a distorted guitar sound.
I recorded a whole disc using a Sanyo boom box and a third tape deck. With the Sanyo boom box you can play two tapes at once so you can “multi-track” dumping it to a third tape deck. Using three tapes in constant rotation you can build up a denser and denser sound.
I have used more traditional recording technology such as four tracks and computers. I love the over modulated sound quality you can get with four-tracks. I like using computer based recording technology because the ease of editing and manipulating sound files. I am not making pristine recordings so the whole idea of analog vs. digital is not that important to me. My main concern that whatever technology I am using that I use it to its maximum effect.
JE: What are your favorite instruments to record with?
DC: I mainly use prepared guitar. I love the infinite possibilities you can achieve using just wood, wire and metal. I also love using a piano. I am totally untrained, but if there is a piano in the room, I can’t help but play on it.
JE: What would you say to critics who suggest that most of your music is "unlistenable", or at least "unhealthy"?
DC: I would definitely say that my earliest work could be categorized as such. Moniker’s goal was to get a visceral reaction from the audience. Moral Crayfish has always been more abstract. With Moral Crayfish I am interested in creating a fascinating sound environment. I have always found things such as feedback pleasing. My goal is not to make something that sounds unpleasant….that is very easy to do. I genuinely find the sound of detuned guitar feedback, metal scraping against strings very interesting and pleasant.
JE: You are also a visual artist and photographer. Are there parallels or linkages between your visual work and your audio output? DC: I think there are parallels between my visual and audio work. In both I am not interested in perfection. I do not want my work to be seen as precious or sentimental. Making a perfect print or musical piece is not honest, nor is it interesting. I like finding success in failure; whether it is an out-of-focus negative that somehow holds together to make an engaging print or a sound piece that uses discordant elements to make a cohesive whole.
JE: Tell us a bit about your collaborative effort "Taken Girls"
DC: The Taken Girls are Jacob Anderson on guitar, Eric Matchett on percussion and myself on prepared guitar. Jacob is in countless bands including Celesteville and Gang Wizard. I first saw Jake at a Celesteville show in the basement of a hippie pizza joint where he did a heartfelt cover of Iron Maiden and then threw his shoe at his guitar. I met Eric and his wife on the bus ride home from a noise show in North Portland that we both attended. Both Jacob and I share a great fondness of obscure New Zealand music from the late 1980s and early 1990s. Eric and I knew each other because we both like to attend Free Jazz shows around Portland. When Jake and I advertised for a drummer for our new project, Eric was the first to reply. Jake is probably one of the best musicians I have played with. He has a great ear and a plethora of guitar pedals and other noise making devices to play with. Eric’s style of drumming does not draw attention to it self, but it is always spot on. With the Taken Girls we hope to combine our mutal love of droney, murky Xpressway style rock with free improvisation. The Taken Girls should have a new EP called “Easier Than Hope” out shortly on Tape Mountain.
JE: Has Moral Crayfish ever played live? What about Taken Girls? What has been your favorite Moral Crayfish or Taken Girls live performance? The worst?
DC: Moral Crayfish and the Taken Girls have both played live. My favorite Moral Crayfish show was at a speak-easy called Disjecta in Portland, Oregon. Each performer was set up in a semi-circle and each performer had 5-10 minutes to play a set solo. The time limit was the perfect amount so one could explore a theme, with out becoming over indulgent. My favorite Taken Girls show was a live set we played on KPSU at Portland State University. I think it was amongst the best stuff we ever put to tape. Both the worst Moral Crayfish show and Taken Girls show was when I became despondent on stage on two separate occasions and decided to break all the strings on my guitar.
JE: What's been your favorite band to see live?
DC: By far Bardo Pond is my favorite band to see live. They have an ability to alter your whole being totally through their music alone. I have had several near religious, almost out of body experiences while watching them play. Their music is all about beauty hidden beneath gobs of transcendent sonic sludge.
JE: Is it true that you were in a Portland band called Montgomery Park? What was that about?
DC: Montgomery Park was a band that was all about toy instruments and malfunctioning recording devices. I played with this lovely couple Jim Ebenhoh & Kelly Joseph (perhaps you know them?) who were from Cambridge, MA. They moved out to Portland a few weeks before I did in the summer of 1999. Kelly, who is originally from New Zealand and attended Montserrat with me, and her hubby Jim, who is originally from Ohio, attended grad school at faire Harvard. We met because of my photograph of Alastair Galbraith that was hanging up at a local coffee shop in Beverly, MA. Alastair was a local musician from Dunedin, NZ the town that Kelly and Jim lived in prior moving back to the states.
Montgomery Park was named after an old office building in Northwest Portland that had a great neon sign on top. With Montgomery Park we attempted to have a naïve approach to music using toy instruments, beer bottles (sometimes with disastrous results) and various other household objects. If we only had a drum machine we could have beaten the Animal Collective to the punch.
JE: Who are the friendliest musicians you know? Does friendliness help or hinder good music-making?
DC: It would be a close tie between Bardo Pond and Rollerball. Both those band make excellent music as well as being excellent human beings. Being friendly can only help in making good music. There are plenty of artists who make great music but are assholes (I won’t name names). It is always disappointing when an artist you like turns out to be a jerk.
JE: Name five records that have most influenced Moral Crayfish's sound.
DC: Lou Reed: Metal Machine Music
White Winged Moth: Ribbon Arcade
Bardo Pond: Bufo Alvarius
Dead C: Clyma Est Mort
Glen Branca: Symphony No. 2
JE: Name five records that you love but which sound completely unlike Moral Crayfish.
DC: Neil Young & Crazy Horse: Arc/Weld
Dinosaur Jr: You’re Living all Over Me
Pavement: Westing by Musket & Sexton
Bob Dylan: Street Legal
Palace: Days in the Wake
JE: Is Moral Crayfish political? Is there a message behind "We Did Not Do It, but We Dug It"?
DC: I don’t see how anyone could not be political when the fascist Bush Régime has been destroying our democracy for the last five years. I would not say that Moral Crayfish are overtly political in the sound pieces. I have used several slogans that I stole from various radical movements to name a few Moral Crayfish releases.
The quote “We did not do it, but we dug it!” was the funniest line in the Weather Underground documentary about the radical group from the 1960’s the Weathermen. After a bombing at the U.S. Capital building a hippie girl states, “We didn’t do it, but we dug it!” I love the quote because it can be applied to any action that you approve of.
I released an EP on Nillacat, Mini-Wagonwheel’s CD-R label called “If You Build It, We Will Burn It.” I got that quote from an Earth Liberation Front action when they burned down a ski resort. They spray painted that slogan on the sides of the buildings they burned. While I would not take part in the destruction of private property, I loved the simple and direct message of that slogan. There are no overt political messages in the sound pieces themselves I just like using borrowed texts to name both my musical enterprises as well as my art work.
JE:What have you been working on lately?
DC: I have completed an as yet untitled E.P. It is less dependent on the guitar for sound. It is mostly manipulated sounds of everyday house hold objects such as glass & plastic bottles, chopsticks, bells, wood, and screw drivers
JE: What record label should sign Moral Crayfish?
DC: Well if Xpressway still existed I guess it would be nice to get signed by them…. Siltbreeze just started up again, which is the label the most closely shares my own aesthetics.
Links:
Moral Crayfish
Nilla Cat
Tape Mountain
Tuesday, March 07, 2006
History
Moral Crayfish was the name of my sister’s imaginary rock band when she was in college. My brother John and I stole the name from her when we entered the battle of the bands in high school. We had discovered that by duct-taping a headphone to the body of our younger sister’s viola and plugging it into the mic jack of a boom box we could get distortion and feedback. We also discovered how to “multi-track” by connecting various boom boxes and audio devices together. We started taping over our parents’ collection of Sermons from their former church, the Alliance Bible Church, in San Antonio to make noise tapes. At this time I had little or no knowledge of avant-garde or underground music. It was with joy and a little disappointment when I first heard the works of such artists as Sonic Youth, Dead C, and Richard Youngs on college radio shows from WVUD & WPRB. It was exciting because these artists were pursuing similar sonic explorations; disappointing because we were not doing anything all that new.
In college a friend gave me a Sears electric guitar that survived a house fire, complete with plastic flowers & 90210 stickers on it. One of the conditions of keeping the guitar was that I was not allowed to remove the stickers. By that time in college I had become interested in the work of John Cage, especially his work with prepared piano. I started applying the techniques Cage used for his prepared piano on my guitar. I would shove metal and wooden objects into the guitar strings. Using the feedback of the guitar to move the objects would cause a loop. The feedback would cause the objects to move, and the movement would make a sound which would cause the objects to move again. When I saw Dean Roberts play with his band White Winged Moth my style of guitar playing changed again. Dean Roberts would use a screw driver to twirl against the strings and the body of the guitar. When I adopted his style of playing I learned that you could have a great deal of control with a wider variety of sound possibilities.
My first release featured my own primitive guitar and piano playing, along with field recordings of my family and excerpts from sermon noise tapes I had made in high school. It was called “I feel for you, but I can not find you.” It was released on Dead-Fish Tapes, a tape-only label run by Jason Cammarata of Goat Boy and Disappointed fame.
I recorded Pain’s Temporary Glory on a computer that could barely handle four tracks of audio in Portland, Maine. The title comes from an interview with BMX freestyler Matt Hoffman, who was quoting Evil Knievel. I misread the quote and thought it said “Pain’s Temporary Glory.” The real quote is “Pain is temporary, glory is forever, and chicks dig scars”
Moral Crayfish: If you build it, we will burn it. After Portland, Maine I moved out to Portland, Oregon--thus fulfilling a dream of living in two separate cities with the same name in one year. I produced “If you build it, we will burn it,” using a Sanyo boom box and toy keyboards. Sanyo boom boxes have the ability of playing two tapes at once, which I then dumped to a third tape deck. I borrowed a four track for final mixings, but the majority of the sound was produced using the more archaic multi-tape deck multi-tracking technique. It was released on Mini-wagonwheel’s (of Rollerball Fame) Nilla Cat CD-R label.
In college a friend gave me a Sears electric guitar that survived a house fire, complete with plastic flowers & 90210 stickers on it. One of the conditions of keeping the guitar was that I was not allowed to remove the stickers. By that time in college I had become interested in the work of John Cage, especially his work with prepared piano. I started applying the techniques Cage used for his prepared piano on my guitar. I would shove metal and wooden objects into the guitar strings. Using the feedback of the guitar to move the objects would cause a loop. The feedback would cause the objects to move, and the movement would make a sound which would cause the objects to move again. When I saw Dean Roberts play with his band White Winged Moth my style of guitar playing changed again. Dean Roberts would use a screw driver to twirl against the strings and the body of the guitar. When I adopted his style of playing I learned that you could have a great deal of control with a wider variety of sound possibilities.
My first release featured my own primitive guitar and piano playing, along with field recordings of my family and excerpts from sermon noise tapes I had made in high school. It was called “I feel for you, but I can not find you.” It was released on Dead-Fish Tapes, a tape-only label run by Jason Cammarata of Goat Boy and Disappointed fame.
I recorded Pain’s Temporary Glory on a computer that could barely handle four tracks of audio in Portland, Maine. The title comes from an interview with BMX freestyler Matt Hoffman, who was quoting Evil Knievel. I misread the quote and thought it said “Pain’s Temporary Glory.” The real quote is “Pain is temporary, glory is forever, and chicks dig scars”
Moral Crayfish: If you build it, we will burn it.
Discography
Moral Crayfish
I feel for you, but I can not find you (dead-fish tapes) 1997
It could be worse, it could be you (self released) 1999
Pain’s Temporary Glory (un-released) 1999
If you build it, we will burn it. (nilla cat) 2002
We did not do it, but we dug it! (field theory recordings) 2005
Catastrophic Success (field theory recordings) 2006
Month of the Dog (rumpus) 2006
I am Fully Aware of My Own Unreality (field theory recordings) 2007
Gadolinite (field theory recordings) 2008
Go To Church (field theory recordings) 2009
Taken Girls
The Best of all Possible Worlds (tape mountain) 2002
I feel for you, but I can not find you (dead-fish tapes) 1997
It could be worse, it could be you (self released) 1999
Pain’s Temporary Glory (un-released) 1999
If you build it, we will burn it. (nilla cat) 2002
We did not do it, but we dug it! (field theory recordings) 2005
Catastrophic Success (field theory recordings) 2006
Month of the Dog (rumpus) 2006
I am Fully Aware of My Own Unreality (field theory recordings) 2007
Gadolinite (field theory recordings) 2008
Go To Church (field theory recordings) 2009
Taken Girls
The Best of all Possible Worlds (tape mountain) 2002
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