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

"Jus"
Players: Jacob Lindsay / Ava Mendoza / Damon Smith / Weasel Walter
Reviewed by: Massimo Ricci, Bagatellen
A rather uncomfortable, half-pungent-half-refined improvisational proposition from a quartet of receptive-minded musicians whose inclinations and - at least to some extent - reputations should supposedly encourage full use of runaway blasts, critically reprehensible user-unfriendliness and hectic free-for-all. Curiously enough, the music ends up in sounding pretty much controlled for the large part of the program instead, countless perturbations notwithstanding. Apropos of this, a loud volume playback is suggested; the perennially non-complying scrutinizer decreed that the six tracks work satisfactorily in the lower regions of auricular sufferance as well.

Lindsay performs on various kinds of clarinet (Ab, Bb, bass and contrabass), negotiating the possibilities of a fair trade between absent restrictions and unrehearsed discipline, which causes his instruments to go furtively unnoticed in certain sections, only to suddenly emerge as the lead voice of sorts in the involuntary architecture, gorgeously misshapen secretions and a brawny timbral individuality in constant evidence. Mendoza - not at all times at the forefront in the mix, which is a plus in comparison with the proverbial egotist attitude of many guitarists - represents a hardly definable, yet still attention-grabbing factor, her mistreatment of the instrument applied with a leg on each side of Frithian tampering (please don’t hit me, Weasel) and spectroscopic imagery of electric humming, string resonance made hostage by the tendency to quietness that the players remarkably exhibit, and regularly too.

Smith, featured on 7-string Ergo bass and Lloopp software, appears as a silent prime mover behind the whole concept, gritty physicality and probing studiousness underlying an ever-conscious approach to the art of stealthy rendezvous in the obscure quarters of instrumental interaction. If there’s some measure of regular bass somewhere in there, I struggled to notice; inflexible abrasiveness and obdurately anti-tonal jarring premeditation, yes - all the way through. From time to time Walter sounds unusually detached but - more frequently - his drumming is as effective as pure caffeine, alternating sharp fragmentations of the rhythmic flow and asymmetrical nervousness to abrupt impetuous enlargements of the dynamic organs (that’s right, this description is spam-influenced) while maintaining an inimitable escapologist personality as far as the exact collocation of a fashionable percussive method is concerned.

Replete with unspeakable shrewdness, this album necessitates of lots of conscientious tries before starting to commit to memory even a single joint of its complicated articulation.

~ Massimo Ricci