Member Since: 9/3/2006
Band Website: zackkouns.com
Band Members: Zack Kouns--Birds in flight, the human voice, tenor and alto saxophone, clarinet, trumpet, temple blocks, chinese opera gong, tape manipulation, violin, banjo, sensing man's terrible seperation from himself, reel to reel tape recorder, piano, acoustic and electric guitars, accordion, whirly, piers as empty as arms, congas, synthesizers, tunnels, electronics, bass, roto toms, timbales, duck call, slide whistle, ukelele, zither, theremin, turtle from a junk shop in Missouri, night time, balalaika, native american flute, kalimba, Fassbinder german, bamboo xylophone, organ, chanter, whispers, knives, silence and space, tremolo harmonica, agogo, elephant bells, drills, translucent recorder, thunder tube, flute, family documents, painful passages, drum kit, thin purplish scar, fire bells, hubcaps, bodies of water
Influences: Absurdity, intense personal experience, memories from extreme youth, the act of renunciation, genitals, Jacques Vache, alchemical symbolism, Henri Rousseau's jungles, God when He is not wrathful: when He is simple and good and touching his prophet's foreheads, the continuity of everything into everything, the attempt to understand wrath, vengeance and violence, language and the occult significance of words, Johnny Ray, The dissolution of the self that music encourages, astrolabes (even if they're eyes seeing something terrible and celestial in the heart), flagellation for ascetic purposes (careful not to say aesthetic), criminals and enemies of a decaying and empty society, The Ohio River, Quetzalcoatl and his Crucifixion, The Marx Brothers, The Theatre of Cruelty, Anabasis, Motets and early polyphonic music of the Church, words of pain, words of healing, The meaning of Cabenza De Vaca's voyage of conquest, The Oil of Mercy, Johannes Kepler finding new harmonies (that are wrongly called dissonances) and slowly accepting irregular shapes, secret societies, the derangement of the sexual instinct, Vaslav Nijinski's final public performance, Myths and man's attempt to embody something eternal, constant and beyond himself, outrage, the gentleness of Else Laske Shuler, eating dinner alone, failure at personal relationships and awkward sexual situations, ethics, photographs of dead children resting peacefully, The Sphinx, loveless love, nude women smoking cigarettes, Wilhelm Reich, physical and psychical abnormalities, Easter Island, cruelty, unwanted pregnancy, ruthless and overwhelming atrocity, space (outer and inner, as well as the distance between objects and sounds)
Sounds Like: Death Jazz, rituals of grief and loss in various cultures, archetypal longing for the beyond, victims of sexual abuse, concentration camps and other horrors of the 20th century, the complexity of modern existence, real pain, real blood, real tears
Record Label: moonmoonmoon; Teenage Whore; Isle of Man; BSBTA
Type of Label: Major