Porch Swing Orchestra Podcast

This week’s pod and music-only YouTube stream feature selections from PSO’s recent live event celebrating the release of our collaborative EP with the Reformers (now streaming and on Bandcamp). We had great music from the Answers and PSO, DIY live screen-printed PSO shirts, popsicles, homemade cold brew, and singing cicadas.The Answers premiere, The Other Woman, a Gavin Watts original, is slated for a winter release entitled, Texas Made Me Do It.Paul Stautinger joins Barry Stone to play PSO

Alex Kannan and Gavin Watts of the Reformers join PSO conductor, Barry Stone, for an interview about their music and influences on the occasion of the release of the Porch Swing Orchestra + The Reformers split EP.Gavin Watts is an Austin-based polymath whose proclivities include painting, and high-level research in the field of public special education,–Gavin is an Assistant Professor of Special Education in the College of Education and Human Development at Texas A&M University–San Antonio. Gavin

This episode begins with the newest PSO, no.212, which was recorded in the traditional manner on my porch but with a twist. After spending some time in Mark Menjivar’s studio talking about field recordings, bird calls, archives, innumerable sound gadgets, and exciting new projects, Mark lent me a curious piece of sound hardware crafted by Brooklyn-based electronic savants Critter & Guitari, the Organelle M. Thanks, Mark! You can use the Organelle to make beats, as a synthesizer, or to process sound,

Porch Swing Orchestra is an art project that pairs music recorded outside with photographs made on-site. Performed and recorded at home and away, solo and with others – birds, guitars, and trucks conspire to form a chance-operated orchestra of delight. The Podcast and YouTube streams include the most current PSO piece along with randomly selected pieces from the past. This edition includes a beautiful poem written and read by Emily Scarlet Kramer, originally posted in the heady months of April 2020

On this podcast and subsequent episodes, Every two weeks or so,  I will share the most recent PSO piece and follow that with about 20 minutes of pieces randomly selected from the archives.This week begins with a cassette from the soundtrack of Carl Sagan’s PBS series, The Cosmos.The synths from The Cosmos are broken up and rearranged and combined with an improvised acoustic guitar captured on the porch. It's the cosmic and the particular or the Infinite and the finite. I loved that series, Sagan’s