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

"Ausfegen"
Players: hartsaw/Aspelin/Smith/Bryerton
Reviewed by: Massimo Ricci, Touching Extremes
PAUL HARTSAW / KRISTIAN ASPELIN / DAMON SMITH / JEROME BRYERTON - Ausfegen (Balance Point Acoustics) This collection of difficult-to-fathom improvisations is subtitled “Dedicated to Joseph Beuys” for a reason. Nearing the end of this session, bassist Damon Smith recalled a performance that Beuys made in 1972 in Karl-Marx-Platz, Berlin, consisting in sweeping the square and depositing the materials in a vitrine, a recording of the sonic content of the action reproduced through a nearby speaker. As a homage to this artistic gesture, the last recorded track “Broom with red bristles” finds Smith playing (standing, with two bows) two prepared double basses lying on their backs, guitarist Aspelin approaching his instrument with a shop broom in the meantime. The whole CD features the same kind of introvert interplay and five listens haven’t been sufficient for me to sketch something akin to a vague idea of the non-idiom around which these carvers move. Besides Smith and Aspelin’s tools, also soprano and tenor sax (Hartsaw) and percussion (Bryerton) are featured, the latter players coming from Chicago while the previously mentioned ones hail from the Bay Area. The artists’ curricula include a who’s who of the major improvisers from various decades of free expression, such as Kyle Bruckmann, Joe Morris, Fred Frith, Henry Kaiser, Cecil Taylor, Peter Brötzmann to name just a few; moreover, the bassist has collaborated with film director Werner Herzog and the Merce Cunningham dance company (talk about polyhedral visual angles). Does this give you the necessary clues to understand what we’re referring to? Nope of course. These elements will help, though: scraping virtuosity, instrumental photodisintegration, four-dimensional anarchy, systematic refusal of snugness. Figures are revealed for a handful of seconds, then they disappear into themselves like timid creatures whose back is full of spikes. Phrases are repeated then dismembered in dirty crystals of speculation, significance outweighing handy-dandy guessing games in a counter-textualism worthy of this caliber of instrumentalists. Still no definition, and it will probably remain so - another excuse for returning. A substantial work under any point of view, deserving hours of dedicated concentration only to scratch its surface.