A New Take On My (non-) Band. We Dominate the Bandwidths of Silence.

It's always been a dream of mine to be in a band that plays acutal music. I say the latter because I've actually been in many bands, in the sense that I've often been in groups of people with a name and a vague intention to play music, but never one that really did shows or anything.

Here's the list to date: in grade school I was in the "Damn Pigeons" (our hit single was to be a song that we actually wrote called "Don't Shit On My Sidewalk"), then in high school it was the "Straw Dogs" (I wrote some music with a midi composer for it but we never really went any further than that) and "Qadafi and the Hit Squad" (a big brass band with two songs, performed once each at an open mike: "Big Noise From Winetka" for the full twelve-or-so-piece group, and me on the euphonium with a lone hi-hat covering "Rubber Ducky"). College was a dry spell, though I guess I played with the UIUC symphonic bands and did ska covers with my neighbors in their attic. (These neighbors were the kind of guys who would get so drunk they would throw all their appliances into the street at 3am, and I had great fun playing with them, but we never really got our act together in a way that we could do a show or even really appear in public together.)

I've also sat in on harmonica for the Uncle John's House Band, an Armenian funk band in an underground club in Moscow, and I played harmonica and did some supporting vocals (in the orgasm sequence) on Green Team's (a Kokshetau Kazakhstan punk band) eponymous release of last year. (After playing one concert with them, the only one I ever did, I was described in a Kazakhstan newspaper as being a "new member of the band", so I think maybe that kind of counts.) Starting in Boise I started a solo career under the monicer "Pow-Wow Cat", and actually got one song I wrote and perfomed, "Married Her In Kentucky" played on Kentucky public radio. Other songs from this period that have earned a following of two fans (and reactions ranging from mild surprise to tired impatience from many others) include "The Monkey Song", "The Can Song", and a true-life sentimental ballad about my friend Tasha called "Flushing Through The Night". If I ever release an album with songs from this era, it'll be called "Slow Dancing With Turtles".

Here in Chicago I "formed" the latest addition, "The Empty Neologisms". Our first album would be called "Dirty Hamster, Lovely Dress". It is basically formed of me, Jake (my roommate), Molly (his girlfriend), and Matt Zanon, whom I greatly respect both for his refined musical taste and for writing an influential (on me) song called "Rachel Don't Surf". So far we've had one "practice" which was about three hours of sitting around and then Matt and I writing a pretty interesting song about Giffen goods and the income and substitution effects in microeconomics. That was a month ago, and with me leaving Chicago in two weeks, I don't have high hopes for us actually gigging anywhere before I go.

However, Jake and Matt pointed out (after many hot and dehydrated days under the Yosemite sun, I might add), that perhaps we are doing more with our non-music than we could with music. As long as the Empty Neologisms don't play anything, they're constantly playing us everywhere. You are listening to our (non-)song right now. Even if you're listening to something else, there we are in the background, not playing. In this sense, perhaps we are the most ubiquitous band in the history of pop music. Sure, you might say, I'm not listening to the songs the Beatles didn't write right now. A fair objection, but the crucial difference is that the Beatles didn't not write that song to not perform it, they didn't write it because of Yoko Ono. As the only band without a "Yoko" - and every band that has not written some song has some sort of "Yoko" - we are the only band not writing music explicitly to have it not be performed, and by making this decision, it becomes us who dominates the bandwidths of silence. It's kind of like John Cage brought to pop music, but without the time limit.

And don't go thinking you can cut in on our airtime just by making a band and not playing anything. We thought of it first.