DESCRIPTION:
Ende Tymes 777 (Day4) Twig Harper performing at Silent Barn in Brooklyn on 4/30/2017.
All rights belong to Twig Harper.

The oceanic movement, convergence, and collision of underground networks is something Americans have become honor bound to celebrate —it’s cool, and it’s been cool. The coolness factor rises the more said network affects the larger, uncool, mass culture, so Twig Harper’s multi-decade sweep of the underground gradually modifying it, inventing it, sculpting it, and often just giving gentle suggestions, probably isn’t going to be served up documentary flambéed anytime soon —no coffee table books of circuit bent electronics, homemade lathe cuts, or consciousness awakening book covers coming anytime soon. There’s something disingenuous about the connection between lack of mass cultural awareness of Twig Harper’s work and his impact on collective consciousness shift. The story goes Twig spent some time growing up in Pennsylvania, moved to Jupiter (you can find it on an American map, HINT: it’s at the bottom), then moved to Michigan where he attended high school with the Wolf Eyes crew, got served up Caroliner records from one Jim Magas, met Partner In Everything and future Nautical Almanac Co-Captain Carly Ptak, and showed high school classmate Andrew W.K he could be come a pop star if he just tried. Things got really hot and ended poorly in Michigan once the cops caught wind of what was really going down, but before splitting to Chicago, Twig formed Nautical Almanac with purveyor and architect of the modern American Noise Underground, Nate Young, figured out how to make homemade circuit built instruments, helped in the cultivation of the limited release cassette label, the midwest house show circuit and generally got across that this whole culture could be fun, connective, ridiculous and a bit pushy (if you ask me), as much as it could be about anything. An escape to Chicago, a junk store, more music, more weird releases on more weird media (lathes, CD-Rs, weirdly sized records, cassettes of all sorts), and then eventually Twig ended up with massive warehouse, used as a performance space and artistic & spiritual cultivation center in West Baltimore called Tarantula Hill. During the 15 some odd years as an occupant of T-Hill, Twig, with Ptak, made records and toured with everyone from the Fort Thunder gang to the Wham City gang to Daniel Higgs, unearthed and moved the outsider street musician Little Howlin’ Wolf to Baltimore, and hosted every important underground band of the 21st century. Perhaps most centrally, the Tarantula Hill mission helped grow the artistic pursuits of countless artist’s and allowed Twig to generally put together work that mixes text and electronic unconstrained convulsions in the full on experimentation and creation of backlashing gems of confusion. A lot of people got touched, a lot of people made records, and some of the people who ran through Twig’s life got famous, some very much so, but also a crop of people across the country got warehouses, booked shows, released tapes, made music out of trash, got interested in psychedelia and consciousness expansion (oh, yeah, Twig gets into that too, he put a sensory deprivation tank and conducted salvia divinorium research after the performance space had run its’ course), most of all a lot of people made music in their own voice, their own bizarre floppy convulsing smashing silly voice, a voice built upon Twig’s shrill yelps. Twig Harper @ Burning Fleshtival 7/27/12: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URQD8uJmT5E