Part of a new album I've been uploading, featuring compositions written over the last several months of 2021. If anyone can pinpoint what all of these compositions have in common, musically-speaking, put it in the comments - there was a concept tying everything together but I'm not going to reveal what it was, haha.

Cover art created using NeuralBlender.

This album is going to be called "Prohibited Topics," a tribute to the textbook authors and teachers whose work is being disrupted by right wing efforts to stifle education about racial disparity and structural racism in the US. These compositions weren't written with this subject matter in mind, full-disclosure, but the album has now been named in response to this issue and will be dedicated to educators, and to truth, which will win in the end despite efforts to silence it.

Prohibited Topics

21 7 6

Hesitation Blues may have been the first twelve-bar blues to be known across the US South, circulating in oral tradition for years – perhaps decades – before it was written down, mostly in versions that were far too dirty to be printed or recorded. Robert Winslow Gordon and Hubert Canfield both collected multiple versions in the 1920s, and Jelly Roll Morton recalled one for Alan Lomax that he’d apparently heard in New Orleans around the turn of the century. 

The Hesitation Blues has since been cleaned up and done by various artists in every genera. However it originated in burlesque and other more phonographic musical forms of the underworld preformed for patrons in juke joints, brothels and speak-easy clubs by early bluesmen. Most versions seem to have included verses in the same basic pattern:

(((((((WARNING: PROFANE LANGUAGE BELOW AS PRESENTED FROM AN ACADEMIC EXPERT PLEASE DO NOT FLAG THIS TRACK. AGAIN. HEED WARNINGS AND BE RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR OWN ACTIONS

GET OUT NOW WHILE YOU CAN

ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE

THE MANAGEMENT)))))))
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I ain’t no butcher, no butcher’s son,
But I can cut your meat until the butcher comes.

I ain’t no milkman, no milkman’s son,
But I can pull your titties till the milkman comes.

I ain’t no sergeant, no sergeant’s son,
But I can handle your privates till the sergeant comes…

…and so on, as well as such straightforwardly descriptive verses as, from Canfield’s collection:

A fist full of teats, and a mouth full of tongue,
Takes a long peckered daddy to make his baby come.

Only the BEST for you all! 
Saturday Satan Sunday Saint JT

Hesitation Standard Blues

Hesitation Standard Blues - Solo Guitar Instrumental Bluesman (Century of Progress)

© Ray Of Sun

Out of the Box September 2022
Exotica erotica weird and wanton

Sex Voodoo

Full album: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIQWBoXYL0Y&list=PLBP9mmNR3Nmk-nGYZ-KD3rwCYzSHNg1me

DO POGRUZHENIJA

New World

I'd Do Anything For A Banana

I'd Do Anything For A Banana Instrumental Collab NoxPox

She makes me feel like I don't mean a thing to her an only her needs matter.
Picture belongs to it's original author, not me, Jill Wise.

Worthless II Final

This is the next in a line of heavy dub songs that Tez and I are releasing. We, or rather Tez, figured out how to create really authentic riddims. So now, it's a bonanza! I really like working with Tez. He's very capable and has excellent musical taste. He is also a certified wizard on the mixing deck. In this song, you'll hear me play bass and organ. You'll hear him play guitar and like I said, the riddim. He also produced it as mixed it. We hope you like it! 

Wurlitzer Dub (with Llanpsych)

This started with Eddy sending me the bass and rhythm guitar tracks set to a click, which I still have a hard time wrapping my brain around better l because it's got so much feeling. Then I added a riddim that Tez (Llanpsych) created. Then I added the organ and the intro guitar and the outro guitar and the vocals. Then I sent it to Tez, who came up with the fill guitar during the verses. This was truly a collaborative effort between three guys who share very similar musical sensibilities. We hope you enjoy the result. You can check out a similar version on Tez's page that's slightly different, but equally as good.

Knocking on Heaven's Door by Bob Dylan (with eddyoffline and Llanpsych)

This song started with Terry sending Tez a really cool, unique beat. Tez then added some killer guitar to it and sent it to me. I added bass, organ, and synth to it. Tez produced it and mixed it, which was quite a task with this one, I believe. he always does such an amazing job of balancing everything, he's my go-to producer and engineer. Although, I have to say, there are many folks out there with great talent with whom I've worked, also. This is my first collaboration with Terry, but we have another in the works at the moment, too. I'm excited to keep making music with him, as well. He has a great sense of musical vision, and is fun and easy to work with, too. We hope you like our first collective psychedelic experiment.

Earth and Sky (with Tea R. Sea and Llanpsych)

"Magic is what we do. Music is how we do it." -- Jerry Garcia

Welcome to my page, my peers, associates, friends, and musical family. I'm a lifelong, multi-instrumentalist musician who records prolifically and joyfully. You'll hear me play guitar, bass (regular four string, and four and five string fretless), mandolin, banjo, keys (piano, organ, synth), lap slide, sitar, and sing on my recordings here. I've been in a few dozen bands in my life, playing everything from bluegrass, jazz, rock, jam band, reggae, funk, afrobeat, Middle Eastern, traditional Irish, singer/songwriter, pop/covers, to experimental/avant garde. 
  Since I found SoundCloud a couple years ago, I've found many talented, creative people with whom to create music. However, in the summer of '23 I formed a band called The Eclectic Collective with some of my favorite musicians I've met through here. It started as a loose collective of musicians and coalesced into a core group of musicians who find other musicians with whom we'd like to make music, then run their songs through our process, and in effect add a full band. That core of The Eclectic Collective includes Tez (Llanpsych), J.J. Terrel, Ken (K2 and the Three), Stephen (Texmex Shaman), Chris (cgmaness), and Mark (mistermark). A couple of other musicians are frequent collaborators, as well, including Artur of Surfers Like Us, and Steve Vervaet of Steve's World. More recently, we've been joined by Carl of The Beautiful Dark fame. 
  The magic of music is amplified exponentially by each person adding to it. So, we really try to add our sorcery all kinds of music from all kinds of artists. Sometimes, we keep it within the group, but a lot of what we do is collaboration with other artists. Therefore these days, 100% of what I do is collaboration, within the group or with other artists on the side.
  I, and we, are also available for hire if you have a song or lyrics and you really want to add bigger instrumentation or a band and good production to it. 
  A small sampling of the artists whom I consider primary influences, and whom you will hear coming through my fingers include Phish, The Flaming Lips, The Grateful Dead, Radiohead, Rye Cooder, Steve Earle, Miles Davis, Fela Kuti, Arcade Fire, Mikey Dread, Yellowman, Purpleman, The Meditations, Michigan and Smiley, Lee Perry, Dillinger, Django Reinhardt, Impossible Recording Machine, The Allman Bros Band, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Cream, Bela Fleck, Les Claypool, Sam Bush, David Grissman, John Prine, Talking Heads, Beastie Boys, MMW, Moe., Morphine, Ween, Steve Lukather, Michael McDonald, John Abercrombie, Dave Holland, John Scofield, Victor Wooten,  Cannonball Adderly, Thelonious Monk, Flea, Parliament Funkadelic,  Frank Zappa, Prince Paul, Pete Rock, Thievery Corporation, Amon Tobin, Chet Baker, Joao Gilberto, Stan Getz, Astrud Gilberto, Carol Kaye, Tame Impala, Mumford and Sons, Japanese Breakfast, LCD Soundsystem, Beach House, Sean Lennon, and Billy Strings, but of course there are many more. I also really like and am influenced by traditional Iranian, Palestinian, Indian, Sri Lankan, Sudanese, Mauritian, Somalian, Egyptian, West African, and Syrian music. I welcome anyone who plays non-western music to contact me for a collaboration, too.
 I'm overjoyed to have found my community on SoundCloud. This is a truly unique forum where everyone is sincerely trying to build each other up. The profoundly supportive and positive SoundCloud community has really opened up an exciting new world of collaboration for me. That is the main reason I'm in the Cloud, actually, to connect with other musicians and make music that I enjoy listening to, and hopefully others do, as well. I am ALWAYS looking to collaborate with interesting musicians, mostly though BandLab, which is where I record almost exclusively. It's a solid, free digital audio workstation hub where you can share recording projects, even if it's not where you make your recordings.
  Everything I do is live instrumental, not programmed, and using no computer beyond my phone. That's not to say that I would be opposed to using that kind of tool, it's just not my preferred medium with which to paint. If you like my music, please share it. If you want to collaborate, my BandLab handle is @bingo_pajama. Feel free to contact me at cornbreadband@hotmail.com, as well, even if you aren't on BandLab.
  If your music is primarily AI, please don't come around my page, as I'm not at all interested in complimenting a machine.
  Here's a link to music I've recorded live with a group of musicians here in Pittsburgh called The Northumberland Street Ramblers.
Check out The Northumberland Street Ramblers on #SoundCloud
https://soundcloud.app.goo.gl/fU4Me

Wurlitzer Dub (with Llanpsych)

Entheogenic Psychonaut (Josh Clary)