Woden Thoth

Bands, past and present: Woden Thoth (solo studio artist); Electric tiger; Frappe Dreamgate; Roasted Cat (unpublished anywhere); Der Zerklang.

I started out playing bass guitar under the primary inspiration of Jimi Hendrix, Black Sabbath, Frank Zappa, Robert Fripp, Amon Duul, the Dead Kennedys, the Sex Pistols, Sparks and many others. I consider any music I have ever heard to be an influence, but more recently I have found the sympathetic drones and sounds of Indian classical and Carnatic music, artists like Ravikiran, Ustad Sabri Khan, Kamal Sabri, Srinavas, and Ustad Munir Khan to be a motivation to stretch myself more into a kind of electric meditation. I have also been strongly influenced by by bands like Gong, Steve Hillage, Faust (the German krautrock band), Laibach, Einstuersende Neubauten, the Buena Vista Social Club, Yello, Kraftwerk, Griffin, Talking Heads, Brian Eno, Hassisen Kone, Hans Reffert and a host of other performers as well as classical European composers such as Rossini, Beethoven, Sibelius, J.S.Bach, Harry Partch and Liszt. And there are numerous bands whose names I've never learned. (This is an extremely foreshortened and abbreviated list.)

I have always wanted to make something sound like the sounds I heard in my head, and desired to break away from the tonality and harmonies that are so common in pop, rock, jazz and blues. I am always experiementing and ready to jam to nearly anything I hear, even non-musical sounds from industry and machines. I am often drawn to the sounds of the wild environment and the beautiful cacophony of creatures.

Much of my music is improvisational and many recordings in my repertoire are actually things that I composed on the spot after turning the recorder on and then just playing whatever I felt moved to play, then adding further layers, both improvisationally and composing.

Music is an expression of my spirit and my target in in it is to capture that organic and etheral quality in the recorded sound that is present in my mind when I doing it.