On the Fourth of July of 1984, Charles Goff III, Robert Silverman, and Killr Mark Kaswan got together at Robert’s house in Albany, California for an improvisational recording session. Guitars, keyboards, and a cello all fed into the Frippertronics-style tape loop system which had been the structural backbone for –ING and many of Goff’s solo projects for the previous five years. The three sonic collaborators didn’t know it then, but that day they made the earliest recordings of Herd Of The Ether Space.
The story of how Herd Of The Ether Space got its name is a long and twisted tale. Referring to this grouping as an incarnation of –ING was out of the question. After a year and a half of performing in local venues and appearing on various radio broadcasts, Goff and Steve Schaer had established the identity of –ING as a duo. (The history of –ING was presented in a previous Taped Rugs podcast series.) Silverman, Kaswan, and others had collaborated on some of –ING’s early works, but by 1984 it was clear that a recording session without Schaer could not be referred to as an –ING recording session.
-ING split up at the end of 1984. Goff and Kaswan started working as Disism in 1985. Disism was a duo from its inception. (The history of Disism was also presented in a previous podcast series.) However, Goff, Kaswan, Silverman and a wide variety of others (including Schaer) partook of occasional improvisational recording sessions for the next several years. The recordings were saved; sometimes copies were made for the participants or for listeners interested in Disism, but no effort was given to name or promote this loose knit band into something more until 1989.
On February 26th, 1989, after a particularly inspiring recording session, Goff, Kaswan, and Silverman decided that there should be a name for their ever-growing band of improvisers. They agreed that the group’s membership should be open to anyone who was adventurous enough to participate, that there should be no restrictions regarding styles of music, methodologies of composition, instrumentation, or anything else. They also agreed that all the recordings of improvisations which had been saved over the previous years could now be released by Taped Rugs Productions as products of this newly dubbed band. Appropriately enough, the band name that they came up with was: “The Order Of Chaos.”
At some point in early March of 1989, however, Silverman reported that another musical act called “The Order Of Chaos” was performing in the San Francisco Bay Area. During a phone conversation, he and Goff used a thesaurus to come up with a new name for their band to avoid any conflicts with this other act. Thus “Herd Of The Ether Space” was born.
The Herd remained active for years, despite members moving to different regions of the USA. It could be argued that the band still exists, although it has been in a dormant state for many years now. By 1998, Taped Rugs had released 34 Herd Of The Ether Space cassette tapes. Many of these are hodgepodges of recordings from various dates and/or involving various participants, physically exemplifying the “anything goes” attitude of the band. Tape labels from countries throughout the world co-released several of these cassettes. Herd Of The Ether Space also contributed material to a variety of internationally produced compilation tapes. The Herd even occasionally performed for public audiences. The last official Herd Of The Ether Space session took place in 2001.
This “Herd Of The Ether Space In The 1980’s” podcast series will present a wide variety of recordings from the early HOTES days, most of which were made using the Taped Rugs Frippertronics-style tape loop system. This particular presentation introduces the band with a half hour long piece recorded on that fateful July 4th, 1984 by Goff, Kaswan, and Silverman. The piece is called “Independence Day” and was released to the public in 1989 on the Taped Rugs cassette entitled “Independence Daze.”
Future chapters in this podcast series will attempt to put a bit of order to the chaotic history of Herd Of The Ether Space, but in the spirit of this anarchic, entropic, unconventional recording act, that order may appear elusive…
THE AUDIO COMPONENT OF THIS PODCAST HAS BEEN REMOVED FROM THIS PAGE. IT IS NOW AVAILABLE AT THE LINK BELOW:
http://www.archive.org/details/HOTESTapeLoopImprovisationsVol1
