- John Dwyer

John Dwyer, Ted Byrnes, Greg Coates, Tom Dolas, Brad Caulkins - Endless Garbage

"Walk the dog. Exercise. Make art.
'The mind is happy when the body is'
Things I can potentially fill my days with if I am stuck at home for months on end…
Then, one day, I hear a frenetic, free drummer playing in his garage a few blocks from me.
And I think “interesting”.
I stand outside his garage staring at the wall, like a fool, for a minute, then decide to leave a note on the car parked there.
This is how I ended up meeting and working with Ted Byrnes.
He wasn’t creeped out, and he ended up sending me a pile of truly spontaneous drums recordings from the carport to work with.
I decided to have every musician come in one at at time and just take a wild pass at their track over the drums.
None of these people had ever met or played together.
I was the connecting thread.
I scratched the surface initially with electric bass, saxophone, guitars, cuica, synthesizers, flute and effects, but soon realized I would need heavy hitters to make this place habitable.

Greg Coates, upright bass expressionist extraordinaire, hacked through the dense weeds, vines and frayed cabling. He lays the map out and makes breathing room. Space to swing a cat.

Tom Dolas (keys), my often foil, came in and began tip-toeing through the rubble and refuse. Dotting the layout with flecks of light, flights of fancy and potential tangential trajectories.

Then the finisher, Brad Caulkins on horns. As always, Brad came in like grace itself, scanned the floor for food, and huffed and puffed and blew the house down. He takes a bruiser situation and lends it some warmth and hospitality, old school.

After I spent a bit of time mixing and editing this down to a palatable offering I couldn’t help but think about human consumption. Our limitless need for material possession, for emotional acknowledgment, for as much information to be thrown in our faces in our very short time here on this mortal coil. We are buried in information. We are constantly hungry and perhaps too smart for our own good. We leave behind us a wake of destruction. Of course, there are moments of great beauty, ingenuity and compassion along the way. You just have to know where to look.
Thus, “Endless Garbage” seemed a fitting title.
A cacophonous and glorious sketch of ourselves.