Chas Smith
Chas Smith was an author, musician, radio personality, and a Cleveland State University music professor. Smith taught and explored the cultural aspects of American Roots music for over twenty years. He held a Masters degree in music from Cleveland State University, where he offered a class on American rock music and its roots, and he taught basic music composition to little kids through a program with the Cleveland Opera as a music mentor in grade schools. Smith sang and played keyboards, bass guitar, and theremin for over 30 years in many different genres. He was in The Clocks, a popular Cleveland punk band in the late '70s and early '80s, then he was keyboardist for the latter-day version of The Pagans. In 1993 he formed the band Einstein's Secret Orchestra, voted Best Electronic/Instrumental Band at the Cleveland Free Times Music Awards in 2001, and produced two CDs of ESO's music.
Chas Smith was an author, musician, radio personality, and a Cleveland State University music professor. Smith taught and explored the cultural aspects of American Roots music for over twenty years. He held a Masters degree in music from Cleveland State University, where he offered a class on American rock music and its roots, and he taught basic music composition to little kids through a program with the Cleveland Opera as a music mentor in grade schools. Smith sang and played keyboards, bass guitar, and theremin for over 30 years in many different genres. He was in The Clocks, a popular Cleveland punk band in the late '70s and early '80s, then he was keyboardist for the latter-day version of The Pagans. In 1993 he formed the band Einstein's Secret Orchestra, voted Best Electronic/Instrumental Band at the Cleveland Free Times Music Awards in 2001, and produced two CDs of ESO's music.
Twilight Of The Dreamboats
Chas Smith's Twilight of the Dreamboats, one of his quintessential electro-acoustic work, is an ever-evolving single gesture, a seamless blend of tones and timbres from his metal sound sculptures (instruments with such names as Bertoia 718, Que Lastas, lockheed, Mantis, Sceptre, DADO) and his homemade and hot-rodded steel guitars (Clinesmith, Emmons, Guitarzilla, Cadillac bass), performed by the composer. “Reaffirming its status as one of the most exciting innovations in the recording and market…
Nakadai
Nakadai, which KPFA Folio/Other Minds Radio called “one of the most explosive LPs of the ’80s,” is a set of five works that offer a catalog of musical “waves”—from ripples to tsunamis. It features Smith playing pedal steel guitar solo, overdubbed, and with a mallet percussion quartet made up of Bob Fernandez, John Fitzgerald, M.B. Gordy, and Theresa Knight.This first CD reissue of Nakadai allows today’s listeners to hear prototypical Smith—music composed when his present style was in its nascent…
Descent
Chas Smith is one of the most unique musicians working today. He has created his own musical world—complete with its own instruments and “language.” It is a world of expansive musical tapestries and carefully sculpted textures that never sit absolutely still, but evolve via a slow, constant change of aural perspective. Smith’s soundworld, however, it is not an altogether alien one, and critics, in their praise of Smith’s work, have repeatedly compared his compositions—some resonantly beautiful, …
An Hour Out Of Desert Center
Chas Smith's An Hour Out of Desert Center is scored for pedal steel guitars, composer-designed-and-built crotales and sound sculptures, zithers, and a 1948 Bigsby lap guitar (a one-of-a-kind instrument that was owned by famed steel player Joaquin Murphey, who played with Spade Cooley, Tex Williams, Sons of the Pioneer, and other classic country artists). Here, Smith’s musical texture, evolving slowly and continuously over the course of the piece, is without dramatic flourishes. Like the spare la…
Aluminum Overcast
Chas Smith's six-movement set of variations that comprise Aluminum Overcast play with the listener’s sense of time—the perceived pace and the clock pace at which musical events take place—as they slowly progress, the spare advancing to the dense.The first five sections/variations are built from shared/recurrent phrases—melodic phrases (for bowed and struck metal), rhythmic phrases derived from geometric and Fibonacci structures, and phrases of “harmonic noise” that vary in density. The sixth mov…
Nikkowolverine
Nikko Wolverine (1999) is a three-movement piece scored for various bowed and struck metal instruments in non-tempered tunings. These instruments, which were designed and built by the composer, emit tones that are rich in complex harmonics and often sound more electronic than acoustic. All three movements of this work share motivic materials, but each successive movement adds more harmonic complexity and textural density to the movement that preceded it.Tons Tons Macoutes (1999) is a texturally …