It's National. It's Public.

The NPR All Songs Considered blog has done a nice profile on yours truly. Here's a snippet:

What is llanos? Does it have anything to do with the sound or creation of the album?

The original title for the album was Pink Meadow, which I kept as a [song title] but felt was too generic for the album and thought might be too overbearing with cover art... a little obvious. I tried a few variations on the "field" theme, but none quite fit, and that has been done repeatedly by ambient and drone artists. But I somehow stumbled on the llanos, which is Spanish for grasslands or plains, and it felt right. Though there is apparently a specific geographic area in South America that uses it as its proper name, and some reviews have assumed that was what I had in mind.

Read the rest here.

Major thanks to Lars Gotrich for the excellent questions.

Llanos in The Wire

January issue of The Wire finally made its way to Central Ohio. Here's a scan of Dan Warburton's Llanos review. Click for high resolution version.

The Right Place

When we have our body and mind in order, everything else will exist in the right place, in the right way.
-Shunryu Suzuki



Reading that line concerning posture in practice this morning, I immediately thought back to a tweet I'd posted an hour or so before describing my set last night as pretty good. Though the mistakes were few, they were there and each one of them could have easily been avoided with a little more preparation.

Parallels have been drawn between experimental music and meditation since the days of Cage (with varying degrees of surface-glossing and racial profiling) but one comparison that is rarely made is the amount of personal, unseen work each take to do properly. Neither comes as simply or intuitively as the first glance would have you believe.

It isn't just closing your eyes. It isn't just plugging in pedals.

Eventually I'll find that right place and I look forward to it. But it is impossible to organize things if you yourself are not in order.

Q & A

The Fine Art of Destroying Everything has questions. I have answers.

They also offer some kind words about Llanos (both the album and the track).

More Titles Than Tracks (January)

More Titles Than Tracks:
An Excuse to Pillage the Scenic Railroads Vaults



Each month this year I'll be posting unreleased works by Scenic Railroads, my duo with Joe Panzner. Some will come from scrapped projects, some long-forgotten recording sessions, some may even be new. Despite only publishing a handful of releases over our eight-year existence, we've actually been quite prolific in the studio and I look forward to sharing these works.

I'm pleased to present the first in the series, from a 2006 session while I was temporarily back from Japan, Gauntlet Closure.


Download (16:20, 256 kb/s, 31.4mb)

More next month.

Corrugated Cassette

In the all the holiday melee, I forgot that a box of ripe cassettes had arrived several days before Christmas and had been filed off out of the way. Having caught my eye and resurfaced, I am pleased to announce that I have copies of my Corrugated tape on Banned.

I first performed Corrugated at the International Noise Conference last Spring as a tongue-in-cheek response to their no laptop policy (what could be less 'laptop' than a single piece of cardboard?) and have closed a good number of my shows since with variations of it.

This cassette is a C20 with a three- and a seven-minute track on each side. Sample below.

$6 ppd. USA, $8 international. Paypal to ms/at\gmby.net.

New Mike Shiflet Bandcamp Page

I spent my spare time over the holidays getting this Bandcamp site together. My main plan for it is to release make copies of the digital masters (not rips) for OOP cassette releases available to buy/stream.



I've started with four tapes: Cannibal Frequencies; Cycles; Disrobed, Spitting Blood; and Gutter Divas; and have put two of 2010 solo releases, the Omnivores LP and Llanos CD, there as well.

As an introductory offer, if you purchase anything from the site this month, I will send you a free download of Gutter Divas to keep your good times rolling.

Thanks for the continued support. Rest assured there will be much no shortage of free music posted here in the weeks and months to come. Have several posts lined up already.