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: Nic Jones, All About Jazz
This is documentation of a never ending story, and it's that the story seems endlessly intriguing which makes for compelling listening. All four musicians are deeply schooled in the rigors of free improvisation, and every note and tone they produce makes that plain. Variety is further aided by the fact that the quartet is broken down into duos and trios on a lot of the pieces, a fact which affords the listener some degree of insight into how the responsiveness of the individuals concerned is conditioned by setting. The notion of an ever flowing stream of music is a pertinent one, not least because, for example, it render the less than three minutes of “Garbage” as thoughts in the moment, captured for posterity. It also gives rise to the contention that improvised music can never be repeated, a point borne out perhaps by the radically different dynamics of the similarly brief “Copper,” which immediately precedes it. Here Paul Hartsaw on tenor sax tacks closely to Evan Parker's model, though it's clear that his vocabulary is his own despite any timbral similarity. ”Broom With Red Bristles” starts from nothing, sounds encroaching upon the silence only tentatively. The slow build in dynamics is measured not only by the tendency of all four musicians not to impose themselves but also by what might be called the needs of the moment. The result is engagingly inconclusive, as if this was one of those occasions when resolution simply denied fashioning. Only feedback closes it out, the keening tone of it a crude hint at discontinuity when set against the arid soundscape in the opening moments of the following “Pamphlet Printed On Plastic Bag” where, over the course of almost fifteen minutes, the music seems like silence's hostage to fortune. Certainly infrequent outbursts of sound seem to suggest a certain railing against that status. ”Stone,” played by a trio of Hartsaw, guitarist Aspelin and percussionist Jerome Bryerton, is again measured but not tentative, as if the musicians are torn between responding and the demands of the musical moment. The outcome of any such dilemma manifests itself in acute responsiveness.