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: Jon Dale, Signal to Noise
"Thierry de Duve one called Joseph Beuys "the last of the proletarians." In his discussion of the relationship between capitalism and creativity, Duve refers to Beuys's democratic formations--social sculpture, his claim that "everyone is an artist"--as manifestations of an "actual political economy" with creativity as its "anchor point." While inherently problematic, as Duve convincingly argues in his article, there's something to be said of Beuys's benign naivety. If one of improvisation's key discursive formations in the post-DIY era is a kind of blithe "anyone can do it (but they don't)" relativism, then players like Paul Hartsaw, Krisdan Aspelin, Damon Smith and Jerome Bryerton become artists whose practice represents the possibilities latent inside of "everyone/anyone." On Ausfegen, they play beautifully, and while the interaction can feel a little desiccated, there's pleasure in their insect-like chatter and hyper-aware responses. In his liner notes, Joe Morris puts it perfectly when he claims Ausfegen is "made by a group of focused musicians who function in a small community creating music using a vocabulary of rarefied materials to express themselves in a contemporary way." Further to this, by defamiliarizing their instruments--in this case, playing the guitar with a shop broom, in reference to Beuys's Ausfegen performance, where he swept Berlin's Karl-Marx-Platz--the players quietly bring art history and politics to bear on a music that offers an emancipatory potential, if not a liberated actuality." Jon Dale