Like the eclectic ‘world folk’ flavours of 2023’s Ramshackle Alchemy album, the Cafe Nowhere series (1 – 4) brings together more recordings inspired by music traditions from around the world. This time the tracks have been selected from 23 different albums across my back catalogue of releases since 2005.
Converging together at the Cafe Nowhere, these recordings offer a colourful journey of exotic moods & sounds, some polished, some ramshackle. Along the way you may hear elements of North African, South African, Middle Eastern / Moorish, Near Eastern, Hawaiian swing, Greek rembetika, Latin / Mexican / South American, Eastern European, Rom gypsy, Appalachian mountain music, medieval, Cuban, Balkan, Asian temple music, tropicana, bluegrass, oldtime jazz or early blues. While much of the music is acoustic-based, you will also hear electric and electronic textures woven throughout. Aside from some collaborations with Luke Yates (acoustic guitar) and Ross Sermons (doublebass), I play all the instruments (or sometimes strangle them), and otherwise concoct all the other sounds.
All roads lead to Cafe Nowhere…
As a listener, my love of exotic sounds reaches back to childhood, but as a listener and creator I had a patch (roughly between 2003 – 2016) during which I was particularly obsessed with any music that was ‘exotic’ and – especially – acoustic. This new attention coincided with a quantum leap in my confidence and ability as a guitarist – meaning I discovered I had the means to actually play the exotic sounds I previously thought beyond my reach.
In my larger evolution as a self-taught musician this was an organic extension of a previous ‘patch’ (ie passionate creative focus) when I lived in Melbourne during the 90s, exploring sacred music traditions from around the world via percussion, tribal drumming, chant and polyrhythm. In my new phase I turned my attention mainly to stringed instruments, starting with guitar then exploring any other members of the lute family tree who were ripe for the plucking.
It was an extraordinarily rich deep dive as a self-guided learner, introducing me to all kinds of new instruments, people, life experiences, and abilities I never knew I had in me.
My explorations of music from all over the world, and across time, have enriched me beyond measure – psychologically, philosophically, emotionally, intellectually, spiritually and creatively. I’m sure that in a more privileged lifetime I would have literally travelled the world as an ethnomusicologist, immersing myself in different musical cultures firsthand, and learning directly from the people who live in that music. Instead, I’m happy to ‘travel without moving’, exploring inwardly and appreciating my relationship to these musics from the inside out. The music is still the medium through which I learn about myself as a consciousness and my connection to the UberConsciousness.
To me, music is liquid energy. I experience the human history of music as infinite tributaries, invisible cultural nerve endings and synaptic forks crisscrossing and cross-pollinating our collective consciousness. Through music I see a vastly interconnected map of human evolution, social and spiritual revolutions, waves of collective human experience rippling through the eons, and whether it’s times of expansion or contraction, upheaval or equilibrium, music is there, flowing through it all.
And the deeper I dive into music’s proliferate bleeding through time, the more my autistic patternmaking brain makes connections between seemingly disparate musics and sees it all as a soup of shared sound, perpetually reiterating itself in endless genetic mutations. Drawing territorial boundaries between different musical expressions seems as silly as believing the world has separate oceans – or the equally ignorant illusion that as a species we ‘are’ racially separate groups. Water particles flow through everything, and to my mind music particles are just as fluid and all-pervasive.
En route to the Cafe….
I barely touched guitar through the 90s, until the end of the decade (see Hellenic Period). When I moved to Tasmania in 2001, my relationship with my guitar playing suddenly blossomed & expanded in quantum bursts. All the complex rhythmic learning I’d been integrating via percussion now translated to guitar (I credit this especially to my experiences of the Ta Ke Ti Na rhythm process with its creator, Reinhard Flatischler, in two immersive workshops I attended in the 90s). This creative growth spurt was also a deeper synthesis of the neurological & psycho-emotional reprogramming I had experienced throughout that decade, which initiated a rapid expansion of my creative consciousness, leading to a similar quantum growth in my visual art, and catapulted me into becoming a teacher.
Now on guitar I discovered new layers of rhythmic control and dexterity, and through deep immersion (listening and experimenting for hours on end) I developed a fingerstyle technique that encompassed anything from bluegrass & Appalachian, to Rom gypsy and Eastern European, to Cuban, Brazilian and all kinds of flavours in between.
My already colourful CD collection became an even spicier patchwork of planetary sounds. I was a sponge and any style I liked the sound of, I tried to decode something of its essence on guitar. As a self-taught musician, it’s all about listening for patterns, and finding them on the instrument; gradually through playing these patterns I came to recognise many similar threads between seemingly unrelated musical cultures. I was especially drawn to the quirkier elements, lopsided rhythms, unusual scales, unexpected uses of harmony and dissonance – many of the same elements that had pricked my ears when I was immersed in early blues as a teenager. Of course when you dig deeper into human history, you can easily see / hear how many of these elements have their roots in the various migrations of either African and Gypsy cultures around the planet.
My impassioned research led me to gradually accumulate a modest collection of interesting old acoustic instruments, usually pre-loved, travellers in time with who-knows-what stories to tell. Often I just loved the aesthetic of them as crafted artefacts, and in all cases I found my own ways of playing them (in my blissful ignorance) – no books, no YouTube tutorials, just creative curiosity and hours of intuitive code-cracking. The family included two antique European melon-backed mandolins, a Russian balalaika, a 12-string mandolin, a strumstick, an antique banjolele, a Turkish kemenche, four different ukuleles and a 3/4 size cello. I also had the temporary lend of an octave mandola and a Turkish saz for a time. I even built myself a primitive ‘cigarbox’ slide instrument, The Threestringbox. All these instruments found their way onto various recordings, and you can hear them all in the Cafe Nowhere series.
In fact, during those years, my newfound guitar skills only featured in my playing until about 2007, after which guitar took a severe back seat to my new obsession of fingerstyle ukulele, with a few cameos from the other aforementioned instruments. After saturating myself in ukulele (and acoustic puritanism) for about a decade, I lifted my embargo on electrified sound in 2016 and went on to play and record whatever the hell music I felt like. In my larger creative cycle this was the synthesis & integration of my deeper learning processes. Often I find it’s necessary to select one area of specialised focus to the exclusion of others, in order to return to the bigger whole with a more complete, enriched, or metacognitive, understanding of the whole – a zoom in / zoom out, micro / macro approach…very much my autistic patternmaking brain in action.
Full circle….
The title Cafe Nowhere refers to a radio show I presented for 6 mnths in 2006, for Hobart community radio station Edge FM. The weekly slot had previously been a traditional folk show and I proposed a slight shift in focus to predominantly acoustic music, in order to expand the palette. Cafe Nowhere was the English translation of Cafe de Nulle Part, the title of a Spondooli Brothers guitar instrumental I had recorded with Luke Yates the year before.
At the time of presenting the show, I had just experienced a sudden and severe (though very necessary) end to a toxic relationship, been forced apart from my very young children, and was in the midst of a nervous breakdown. The process of planning each week’s show – the frontal lobe executive function activities of selecting tracks, organising the play order and timing, typing out all the playlist info, credits etc – was hugely beneficial to my mental state, a real oasis in my chaos. Not for the first or last time, music helped me through in my darkest hour…..and in the case of the radio show, it provided my lightest hour each week. Knowing the severity of my breakdown state at that time, I’m still amazed at what I managed to accomplish – through my love of music and sheer autistic tenacity.
The Cafe Nowhere series was compiled as a comprehensive overview of my favourite ‘world folk’ explorations, gathering them together in one spot so that listeners might access them more easily. It’s also in memory of the radio show (and, years later, a monthly live music open mic that I coordinated using the same acoustic format), and my capacity to keep meeting the full Force of Life head on with transformational creativity. The recordings I’ve selected for this series are not arranged chronologically, I’ve just organised them into playlists that please me. Each of the Cafe Nowhere albums contains a similar mix of styles, drawn more or less from the same 23 albums.
Below are the original albums, listed chronologically. All albums are solo recordings unless otherwise indicated. You can of course listen to them in full on my Bandcamp site, where many more musical delights await:
- An Anthology Of Revised Ambiguities (Spondooli Brothers – 2005)
Mostly fingerstyle acoustic guitar (myself & Luke Yates), with flavours of Rom Gypsy, Eastern European, Euro-folk, Latin, circus music & cabaret – quirky & playful. - A Month Of Moonbeams (Spondooli Brothers w/ Andrew Morrisby – 2006)
A shambolic live recording of Spondooli Brothers with Andrew Morrisby joining us on cello. - Camel Lips (2006)
My solo side-project of similar Spondooli flavours. - Marzipan (2007)
European mandolin, octave mandola, fingerstyle acoustic guitar, ukulele. Flavours of baroque, Middle and Near Eastern, Moorish, Greek rembetika, Balkan, celtic. - Limited Emission CD (w/ Ross Sermons – 2013)
Fingerstyle ukulele and doublebass. Flavours include jazz, swing, tango, bossanova, rembetika & appalachian. - Pigbox & Co. Vol 1 & 2 (2016)
Metal resonator ukulele (PIGBOX) & other ukuleles, acoustic & electric guitar, loads of other instruments. Flavours of ramshackle folk, Depression-era blues & jazz, tinpan alley, oldtime, country & hillbilly, and more. A loose hoot. - Skedaddle! (w/ Ross Sermons – 2017)
More fingerstyle ukulele and doublebass. Oldtime jazz, 20s & Gypsy swing, Cuban, Latin lounge, Hawaiian. - Skin (2017)
African flavours including Afrojazz, Hi-life, Nrth African desert blues, AfroCuban and other hybrids. - The Ears Have Walls (2017)
Very eclectic album, a bit genreless but including electroacoustic, dub, lofi postrock and others. - Threestringbox (2017)
Featuring my home-made ‘cigarbox’ slide guitar (Threestringbox), with loads of other instruments. Roots music, world folk. - Is Land: Edges Defined By Water (2018)
Tropicana, especially influenced by the urban electric guitar-driven music popular in Luanda during the 60s & 70s, as well as the soulful, plaintive “morna” music of Cape Verde. - Gringo! (2018)
Spaghetti western flavours – Mexican, Latin, some acoustic world folk, some grungy electric guitar twang. Spicy. - And Then I Wasn’t… (2019)
Very eclectic, experimental, genreless assortment. - Hill Tribes Of The Huon Valley Region (2020)
Return to all-acoustic instruments, and featuring Threestringbox. Improvisational hybrid of loose world / jazz / folk flavours. - As Is Was (2020)
Diverse collection of short acoustic snippets & sketches – acoustic guitar, ukulele, mandolin, Turkish fiddle & others. Many flavours. - Cut From A Different Cloth (2021)
Remixed recordings of drumming group Rhythm Collision. Percussion-driven with additional electronics and other instruments. - Crucible (2022)
Mostly electronic textures, semi-ambient, moody experimental atmospheres. - Temple (2022)
Influenced by Asian temple music, but especially the resonances of metal instruments. Slow, spacious and meditative. - Kro Gnosis (2022)
Sort of jazz-tinged world folk, rhythmic and atmospheric, combining organic & electronic instruments, with slight nods to Middle Eastern flavours in places. - Xenografika (2022)
Sort of jazz-tinged world folk, rhythmic and atmospheric, combining organic & electronic instruments, with slight nods to Middle Eastern flavours in places. - Burn That Ukulele! Vol 2 & 3 (2023)
Solo acoustic fingerstyle ukulele instrumentals in all flavours.
The process of creating the cover artwork for the Cafe Nowhere series was a sheer delight and an opportunity to give myself some creative playtime. I’d recently had a taste of it working on the illustrations for the Burn That Ukulele! series, and Cafe Nowhere immediately suggested the same style – slightly surreal and Tintin-esque, harking back to the art I created for the Spondooli Brothers and continued with the Moon Man character during my ukulele years.
I imagined the Cafe as a kind of oasis, a mythical meeting ground for the various musical flavours represented in the albums, each represented by (mostly) rare or unusual animals, who were further rarified by their uncharacteristic ethnicity or era: The hairless Sphinx cat from Mexico (playing an armadillocordion), the Tibetan (?) Axalotl, the medieval Pink Fairy Armadillo, a Mediterranean-looking Ibis, a Depression-era Praying Mantis, an African drumming Manatee, a Moroccan Giant Anteater and a Rom Gypsy Pig. The pig of course is not rare, but was chosen as a reference to the pig who became a kind of mascot on a lot of Spondooli Brothers posters many moons ago.
There was no particular logic to choosing the animals. The Pink Fairy Armadillo was a revelation – I had no idea such a thing existed! As always, another learning curve, another creative meditation on the strange process of existence, another odd convergence of absurd threads at the Cafe Nowhere…