As originally published on sarth.net, 2010 and 2014

Bio

This is the old page, kept as it was. Today’s page: About.

October 30, 2010

Sarth Calhoun is a musician who stubbornly refuses to choose. Rather he seeks to synthesize: electronic and acoustic, improvised and composed, alien and familiar, sound design and spoken word.

Fortunately he has been helped in this quest to have his cake and eat it too, sharing stage and studio with luminaries of the nebulous world where rock and jazz dissolve into pure sound and poetry, such as Ulrich Krieger, Rob Wasserman, John Zorn, and Laurie Anderson.

Most frequently he has collaborated with Lou Reed, with whom he has worked on a number of projects ranging from meditation music to rock shows to touring with the deep-noise Metal Machine Trio.

Sarth's current brainchild is Lucibel Crater, fronted by singer/songwriter/cellist Leah Coloff, and with Paul Chuffo on drums. Often described as "cubist," this trio has been called "Bjork crossed with the White Stripes." Lucibel Crater uses experimental methods to create music with familiar structure and grooves; A typical Lucibel Crater show might begin by meticulous live looping of syncopated drum parts, build into a crescendo of noise, then dissolve and coalesce into a catchy melody sung over a brooklyn-style groove.

When performing with Lucibel Crater, Sarth is a modern electronic alchemist, using multiple laptops to loop and distort sounds while he plays bass and melodies on a Continuum Fingerboard. He is an endorser for Ableton Live and a beta tester for the Symbolic Sound Kyma system, which he has used to develop a new kind of synthesis he calls SeqOSC, a relative of AM synthesis derived from exploring the analogies between rhythm and timbre. When agitated during performance, he tests the physical limits of the continuum fingerboard, attacking the instrument "like a lion chasing a wounded wildebeast." After watching videos of Sarth's playing at lollapalooza to 50,000 people, Lippold Haken, the continuum's creator said: "I Lost sleep. I even dreamt about it last night. It was one of those thousands-of-people-watching nightmares."

Lucibel Crater is a trio which is collapsing boundaries and discovering new polarities to exploit. Their live shows are a journey, you get on the road at the beginning and at the end you exit in a whole new place. And perhaps you never return ...

Their first full-length "The Family Album" was released in 2008 and features a Lou Reed guest appearance. Upcoming releases include a series of singles by different producers and an instrumental/improvised CD. Look for them soon.

................. more coming soon ............

September 10, 2014

Sarth began playing music and writing lyrics at age six. In his teens, he stopped buying comic books to save up for his first bass guitar. He began playing in rock bands around New York City while getting acquainted with the cyber world in a time he refers to as “the grey era,” when web pages were not yet marked up with color.

Along his musical journeys, he met cellist and songwriter Leah Coloff, who convinced him to combine computers with music. The band they established, Number19, funded its first record with downloads from mp3.com in 2001. Then in 2005 he founded the band Lucibel Crater, where he really began to experiment with electronic music and the looping of sounds, a band which Vogue Italia described as “Bjork meets The White Stripes.”

Sarth met Lou Reed through their love of Tai Chi, and they decided to do an album of meditation music together. In between touring tiny venues in Italy and Germany with Lucibel Crater, Sarth joined forces with Lou Reed and Ulrich Krieger to form the Metal Machine Trio.

Currently, Sarth is inventing a new medium called the gralbum (graphic+album) to combine his lifelong love of music with his mistress, graphic novels. The premiere gralbum is The Book of Sarth, available for download at the iTunes store. This will be the first of many releases from the Gralbum Collective, formed to house more of his collaborative creations and help other artists produce similar works.

He is the continuum fingerboarding champion of the world.

................. more coming soon ............

Reproduced word for word from the Internet Archive’s copy of October 30, 2010 and the Internet Archive’s copy of September 10, 2014.