A song recorded the day after recording "The Sleeping Pig". And before recording this song, I visited the same large sleeping pig as it was waking up for dinner from a nap in a mud bath. 

The photo is of myself playing the adungu used in this song, and Bomba the cat.

Instruments:
Adungu, Tin Whistles, Synthesizer, Bell

The Waking Pig

Original compositions played upon various acoustic instruments. 

At the moment, the majority of music I record is original folk tunes. Most of these tunes arise whilst out in natural ecosystems or shortly after visiting a natural ecosystem. The titles often reflect an aspect of the ecosystem I had noticed while the tune came about. Lately this is usually a species of bird.

Tin whistles and flutes appear the most often in my recordings; though mandolin, tenor guitar, lyre harp, jaw harp, dulcitar, and a handful of other instruments show up fairly often as well.

And here's some more music I've made along with my friend Dan Jones:
https://soundcloud.com/user-453898279

Music for the Archaic Recurrence!

The music that has always fascinated me the most is that which captures an archaic, tribal, primitivistic sense of the origins of music in its pure ritualistic form. I have always been fascinated by the breadth of instruments that we have created over our history. As a guitarist, the raw acoustic sound of cross picked strings was where I first found that type of musical resolution or catharsis, yet there was always something missing. As the guitar itself is a relatively modern instrument, it seemed a bit of an anachronism for my purposes. The lyre was the obvious alternative choice as it had both that ancient vibe which I had been looking for, along with the style of playing that had attracted me to the guitar in the first place. I have no pretensions of recreating music "as it was." What I am doing is purely contemporary in its conception of capturing the essence of what those instruments, times and rites mean to us today. The past is something distinctly unknowable and hence exotic, all the better for any musical flights of fancy. 

I chose the name Ataraxia for a simple reason as it seemed to best describe the lyre's ability to calm the mind, something which seems even more germane to the stress relief needs of our current culture. It is this instrument that has brought me closest to that original sense of musical catharsis. 

The notion which best sums up my project and is the main yardstick by which I judge the success of any particular track, comes from George Bernard Shaw's play "Back to Methuselah." It is a section of the play called "As Far As Thought Can Reach" in which a future civilization reattains the austere beauty and simplicity of classical Greece. I imagine those great childlike geniuses of Shaw's play would have (or perhaps one day in fact will) play something quite similar to my modest attempts in returning music to its ancient muses and learning to listen to itself once again.

The Waking Pig

Zach Schneider