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Joseph Waters is excited about his new percussionist, a drummer-virtuoso named Justin DeHart. “He’s been to India three times on Fulbright scholarships to study tabla.” A tabla maestro would be useful in Waters' line of work, which is the creation of an off-the-rails blend of electronica mixed with standard musical instruments in a band he calls Swarmius. “He plays a trap set too.” Lionheart, in fact, is fresh off an engagement with Cheap Trick. “Last summer, he played 35 shows with them. They needed a tabla player, so they hired him.”
Waters is himself a laptop artist and a composer with big ideas. The musicians he works with all tend toward prodigy status by necessity. “I have world-class players in Swarmius, and I throw shit at them and rather than telling me to go screw myself, they figure out how to play it. Sometimes, they have to reinvent their instruments because what I ask them to do exceeds their limitations.” But they can cut it, he says. “They take it to the edge, and they fly.”
When I first met Joseph Waters, he’d just been hired by SDSU to build them an electronic music program. On that day, Waters was inside the recording studio he’d installed in his La Mesa home, recording wasps. He wanted their unique noise for a project. He unscrewed a jar full and released them into the room. I asked how he planned to control them. “Easy,” he’d said, switching on a bare naked bulb next to the microphone. The wasps surrounded the bulb and buzzed, tape rolling. Later, Waters would digitize the natural wasp sound and involve it in one of his recordings.
Making music with non-traditional tools for Waters is not unusual in and of itself. He’d dropped bowling balls from a ladder with Portland’s Fear No Music ensemble, considered throwing a vibraphone into a swimming pool, and, he was one of the first adapters to convert a Mac into a keyboard. Once, he transformed a bridge that spans the Martin Luther King Freeway near downtown into a musical instrument by affixing bronze tubes to the handrail uprights making, in effect, a giant xylophone of it. One plays the bridge by dragging a stick across the tubes while crossing from Golden Hill to Sherman Heights.
Swarmius is Moby gone over to the dark side, where Yoko Ono is the Dungeon Master and Brian Eno keeps score. I wrote those words years ago for the print version of the Reader in some kind of an attempt to describe the effect of the band, the essence of a music that Waters says incorporates both Tupac and Mozart and pretty much anything else that strikes his fancy. Now, I would amend my earlier assessment by taking out the references to Ono and Eno. In their place, substitute Carl Stalling (he scored Warner Brothers and Looney Tunes cartoons in the 1930s) and Mad Magazine, respectively.
At present Waters is consumed with dubstep. Dubstep started in London in the late ‘90s. It is syncopated bass-and-drum work that sounds more complicated than it is. Think four-on-the-floor kick drum with an accent every third beat in the measure, and go from there. “I started listening to it a while ago, and I found out it has two tempos simultaneously. Your brain is continually tossed back and forth between the two.” “Amphibious Dub,” one of his latest compositions, will be on the set list for November 18 at the Space for Art in East Village, as will police whistles.
“The last time we performed, I passed 70 police whistles out to the audience, and they blew them all at once on cue. That’s a whole new instrument,” he says. I can hear the wonder in his voice. “I’ve heard one or two used before, but 70 at the same time?”
Swarmius performs as a duo 11/18 at the Space for Art in East Village.
Joseph Waters is excited about his new percussionist, a drummer-virtuoso named Justin DeHart. “He’s been to India three times on Fulbright scholarships to study tabla.” A tabla maestro would be useful in Waters' line of work, which is the creation of an off-the-rails blend of electronica mixed with standard musical instruments in a band he calls Swarmius. “He plays a trap set too.” Lionheart, in fact, is fresh off an engagement with Cheap Trick. “Last summer, he played 35 shows with them. They needed a tabla player, so they hired him.”
Waters is himself a laptop artist and a composer with big ideas. The musicians he works with all tend toward prodigy status by necessity. “I have world-class players in Swarmius, and I throw shit at them and rather than telling me to go screw myself, they figure out how to play it. Sometimes, they have to reinvent their instruments because what I ask them to do exceeds their limitations.” But they can cut it, he says. “They take it to the edge, and they fly.”
When I first met Joseph Waters, he’d just been hired by SDSU to build them an electronic music program. On that day, Waters was inside the recording studio he’d installed in his La Mesa home, recording wasps. He wanted their unique noise for a project. He unscrewed a jar full and released them into the room. I asked how he planned to control them. “Easy,” he’d said, switching on a bare naked bulb next to the microphone. The wasps surrounded the bulb and buzzed, tape rolling. Later, Waters would digitize the natural wasp sound and involve it in one of his recordings.
Making music with non-traditional tools for Waters is not unusual in and of itself. He’d dropped bowling balls from a ladder with Portland’s Fear No Music ensemble, considered throwing a vibraphone into a swimming pool, and, he was one of the first adapters to convert a Mac into a keyboard. Once, he transformed a bridge that spans the Martin Luther King Freeway near downtown into a musical instrument by affixing bronze tubes to the handrail uprights making, in effect, a giant xylophone of it. One plays the bridge by dragging a stick across the tubes while crossing from Golden Hill to Sherman Heights.
Swarmius is Moby gone over to the dark side, where Yoko Ono is the Dungeon Master and Brian Eno keeps score. I wrote those words years ago for the print version of the Reader in some kind of an attempt to describe the effect of the band, the essence of a music that Waters says incorporates both Tupac and Mozart and pretty much anything else that strikes his fancy. Now, I would amend my earlier assessment by taking out the references to Ono and Eno. In their place, substitute Carl Stalling (he scored Warner Brothers and Looney Tunes cartoons in the 1930s) and Mad Magazine, respectively.
At present Waters is consumed with dubstep. Dubstep started in London in the late ‘90s. It is syncopated bass-and-drum work that sounds more complicated than it is. Think four-on-the-floor kick drum with an accent every third beat in the measure, and go from there. “I started listening to it a while ago, and I found out it has two tempos simultaneously. Your brain is continually tossed back and forth between the two.” “Amphibious Dub,” one of his latest compositions, will be on the set list for November 18 at the Space for Art in East Village, as will police whistles.
“The last time we performed, I passed 70 police whistles out to the audience, and they blew them all at once on cue. That’s a whole new instrument,” he says. I can hear the wonder in his voice. “I’ve heard one or two used before, but 70 at the same time?”
Swarmius performs as a duo 11/18 at the Space for Art in East Village.