Ohioan

Ohioan is living music. It is living because it changes, it grows and reduces. Some nights its a minimalist drone ensemble of mountain dulcimers. Next week theres a wedding gig playing Lucinda Williams and Charlie Feathers covers. Hitchhiking tours with cassette loops and lap steel. Generator parties in the desert, stacks of amplifiers and drumsets boogie all night. EL34s and 12AX7s glowing in the dark, and the spark of a shotgun blowing a bottle of Dos Equis off the wall of adobe ruins. Read more on Last.fm …read full bio

Ohioan is living music. It is living because it changes, it grows and reduces. Some nights its a minimalist drone ensemble of mountain dulcimers. Next week theres a wedding gig playing Lucinda Williams and Charlie Feathers covers. Hitchhiking tours with cassette loops and lap steel. Generator parties in the desert, stacks of amplifiers and drumsets boogie all night. EL34s and 12AX7s glowing in the dark, and the spark of a shotgun blowing a bottle of Dos Equis off the wall of adobe ruins. High country, desert stone. The project started on a lone walk from Chicago to Portland, first show at a hair salon in southern Illinois, playing “She’ll be Comin Round the Mountain” to grandmas and cheerleaders for $20. It was never intended as a solo project, or a forum for ego or a personality. Along with the music, a main element in the band is radical politics and environmentalism, with many members involved in direct resistance and organisations such as DGR and No Mas Muertos. The band has come to encompass a changing collective of activists, artists, bikers and farmers, dishwashers and dog-lovers, shoplifters and carpenters. Its a mess and its never finished. Its a situation to work out an idea. The music is never played perfectly because perfection is a dull myth. We keep it simple, only ask that the players listen to each other, react. It is not a nightly recital. It is an ongoing dialog. At the core there are songs. Impressions of life during an empires decline. Minimum wage and public schools. Songs of dying earth, struggling people, dirty dishes and the joy of eating a good cookie. Country weepers and arrogant defiance. But they all ask the same questions: Why do we do it? Open pit mines and disposable cellphones, polluted water and abused children… They ask these questions and they all make the same statement: There is something else. If we want it. But in the end its just making noise with some friends, trying to fight off the black cloud for 45 minutes. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.

User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License and may also be available under the GNU FDL.

…shrink me down again