Balance Point Acoustics : Damon Smith

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Featured CD:

Firestorm is an intense and musically assaultive release of killer, balls-out free jazz that will appeal to those who long for the most bombasic works of Broetzmann, Ayler, Takayanagi and Cecil Taylor! This release reveals many shades of intensity and mood while remaining frenzied and inventive at all times. Featuring Taylor alumni Marco Eneidi (alto), Marc Edwards (drums), Lisle Ellis (bass), Elliott Levin (tenor), Sun Ra Arkestra legend Marshall Allen (alto), bassist Damon Smith and manic Austrian reedist Mario Rechtern, Firestorm is a delerious concoction of new energy music that pushes beyond the stratosphere of sound!

You can send a paypal for $15 pp to damon@balancepointacoustics.com If you would like one. Buy This CD

A few copies of "Healing Force" are available You can send a paypal for $15 pp to damon@balancepointacoustics.com If you would like one.

Vinny Golia-reeds
Aurora Josephson-voice
Henry Kaiser-guitar
Mike Keneally-piano, guitar and voice
Joe Morris-guitar and double bass
Damon Smith-double bass
Weasel Walter-drums

Seven major figures from the art-punk, free-jazz, brutal prog, improvisational and modern jazz world come together for a ROCKING tribute to the unfairly ignored, misunderstood and vilified late period works of Albert Ayler. These late period songs have always seemed to me like they may have been some of the most personally spritually resonant for Ayler, but the musicians and the culture of the late 1960s were possibly not able to successfully translate and perform his concept of spirituality, free jazz, boogaloo, nursery rhythms, marching bands, blues and r'n'b, and certainly the free-jazz following public was not ready to accept it. Now, 40 years and many stylistic mash-ups later, perhaps these works can be better enjoyed.

“Albert Ayler's later works (Love Cry, New Grass and Music is the Healing Force of the Universe) seem to be generally reviled. Through meditations, dreams, and visions, the players on this project were given the message to once again attempt to send the people of earth a message of love, peace, and spiritual understanding. We selected a representative set of tunes for this material and essentially let it play itself through us. We hope you will be as surprised as we still are by the results of this invocational experiment. We hope you will like this record.”
- Henry Kaiser, producer and guitarist Buy This CD

Limited copies of the "Noisy People" dvd are available here. It is a Film by Tim Perkis featuing Damon Smith and other Bay Area Musicians. Includes footage of Gratkowski/Bryerton/Smith and Wolfgang Fuchs' Six Fuchs Project. Buy This CD

Improvised music form Oakland and Tel Aviv from the Jerusalem based Kadima Label.
Aurora Josephson - voice
Ariel Shibolet - soprano saxophone
Jen Baker - trombone
Scott R. Looney - piano
Damon Smith - double bass Buy This CD

"Ghetto Caylpso" Peter Kowald/Marco Eneidi/Damon Smith/Spirit out now on NOTTWO records. Buy This CD

New from Nuscope Records: Biggi Vinkeloe, alto saxophone, flute; Damon Smith, double-bass; Kjell Nordeson, drums, vibraphone Buy This CD

Forthcoming CD's

BPA 013 "Pepper Spray" Ariel Shibolet/Jen Baker/Damon Smith/Jerome Bryerton

Bertram Turetzky/Damon Smith ThoughtBeetle

"Mirrors Broken but No Dust - bpa001
The Sale of Tickets for Money Was Abolished - bpa002"
Players: Peter Kowald, Damon Smith - bpa001
Tony Bevan, Damon Smith, Scott R. Looney - bpa002
Reviewed by: Derk Richardson - SFWeekly

In the Bay Area's tight-knit but internationally networked creative music community, few have worked harder at mastering an instrument and boosting the scene than bassist Damon Smith. His willingness to throw himself into every available context, even when he's in over his head, has accelerated the advancement of his technical skill and his on-the-spot creativity. On the first two releases from yet another local label dedicated to documenting the extemporaneous encounters that occur where only a fraction of the population is willing to go (in terms of both musical ideas and the physical spaces where they're played out), Smith exercises burgeoning talents to absorbing effect.

Mirrors is a set of contrabass duets with German virtuoso Peter Kowald. The first half of the CD captures an April 2000 live performance at Gallery 2310 in Oakland, a half-hour-long musical conversation with extended bowed and pizzicato techniques as the vocabulary. Five days later the pair went into an Oakland studio and recorded seven shorter improvised encounters. What these uncannily like-minded musicians explore is far removed from jazz bass solos that skitter up and down the neck with fluttering runs and tricky double stops. They are immersing themselves in a vast moment in which listening and instantaneously responding are one, with fascinating, rich textures and sonic landscapes as the result.

The Sale of Tickets is a set of 10 instant compositions performed in a two-hour session that took place between the two Kowald-Smith encounters. The instrumentation — Englishman Tony Bevan plays bass sax and local new-music activist Scott R. Looney plays prepared piano and electronics — generates a different, often more pointillist field of sound, but the feel of simultaneous urgency and focused attention is similar to that on Mirrors. Investigating a world opened up by Cecil Taylor, John Cage, Bertram Turetzky, and others, these musicians give us the chance to renew our understanding and experience of music.