Kwisp is a San Francisco based musical group, featuring members of the legendary Fifty Foot Hose. Their instrumentation is unique, most of it built by the band itself. Their first album, Teriyaki Vest Odyssey, merged Elf songs, free jazz, Dada, Δϑ ±µÃ‡ and Tantric Appalachian Pygmy Music. The main core member is Altered Walter Funk, and Reid Johnston also plays on many of the tracks.
Kwisp currently has two released recordings, Teriyaki Vest Odyssey, and Altered States of Alien Kwisp.
Fifty Foot Hose founder, Cork Marcheschi was a guest on Teriyaki Vest Odyssey for one song. Kwisp's second album, Altered States of Alien Kwisp is a musical collaboration between Kwisp and Daevid Allen from the band Gong.
Kwisp is sometimes joined live by Lenny Bove from Tripod Jimmie and Fifty Foot Hose.
Some live performances feature HOLOGRAPHIC ANIMATIONS that animate along with the music, using a custom built HOLOGRAPHIC VIDEO SYNTHESIZER.
The Hologlyphic Funkalizer projects Holographic Glyphs, Sacred Hyper-dimensional Geometry, Crop Spheres and more. They animate and spatially transform into each other, controlled by unique sound sculptures and a dedicated control panel. Moving holograms and music become one, they are integrated and inter-modulating.
Kwisp performing July 23rd at the Edgetone Music Summit-
Kwisp Website
http://www.hologlyphics.com/kwisp.htm
Hologlyphics Website
www.hologlyphics.com
L i n k s -
Video of Kwisp live.....
Lenny Bove Website
Where to get this stuff:
Teriyaki Vest Odyssey
Altered States of Alien Kwisp - Daevid Allen & Kwisp
Reviews:
Kwisp -- TERIYAKI VEST ODYSSEY [Pinephone Recordings]
Review in Dead Angel 1
A bold assertion in the liner notes proclaims, "WARNING: THIS IS NOT NEW AGE MUSIC!" Well, no shit -- those moony New Age yahoos aren't anywhere this weird and entertaining. This is not wallpaper music for listening to while polishing chakra stones, to be sure. The band is actually a new-school psychedelic band composed of former members of Fifty Foot Hose with guests from Gong (Daevid Allen) and Mandible Chatter (Grant Miller), among others. The core consists of multi-instrumentalists Walter Funk and Reid Johnston, who have been playing with Fifty Foot Hose since the band reformed in 1995; FFH founder Cork Marcheschi plays on the title track here as well. Fifty Foot Hose were a huge influence on bands like Pere Ubu, Chrome, Throbbing Gristle, and the eternally godlike Angel'in Heavy Syrup, with their peculiar penchant for turning gadgets into oddly listenable tools of psychedelic sonic mayhem. The better-known Gong were probably an influence on seventies psych rock second only to Amon Duul (take your pick of which version), but FFH -- who released one brilliant album, CAULDRON, in the late sixties and then didn't bother to get around to putting out a second one until 1997 (perhaps they were too busy eating "special" brownies and building new noise-making gadgets, eh?) -- were always a much weirder band, and the bands they influenced have in turn been a huge inspiration to tripped-out noisemakers from the late seventies onward.
This album makes it obvious they haven't lost their fondness for freaky and often homemade gadgets; following in the footsteps of Sun Ra and his Cosmo-everything tone tools, this album boasts sounds generated by such quirky items as the Cupid, the Ulysses, and the Hologlyphic Funkalizer, not to mention perverted uses for soda straws, jaw harps, sousaphones, and spark machines. (The Cupid is played by Fred "Spaceman" Long, which makes a deranged sort of cosmic sense.) The ten songs here -- with titles like "Dragon Titties," "Surrealistic At Large Domino," and "Ether Bunny's Music for the Massless" -- are deeply surreal and frequently hypnotic exercises in psychedelic funk that bridge the gap between Sun Ra and Funkadelic with lots of windowpane acid. Needless to say it's all incredibly swell, and anybody who was ever a fan of the above-mentioned bands (or just a fan of psych / devolved music in general) should want to hear this. The outer (and inner) spaceway monorail is boarding; come get your psychedelic hypnogroove on with the boys with the best toys.
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"Eddytor's Dozen"
Chuck Eddy, Village Voice- October 2004
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“ The Kwisp sound alternates between sparse and chaotic junk music ala NWW and weird, tribalistic disordered songs like liturgical music made by nitrous-crazed Alabamanian-Polynesian dwarves. Maybe a fond look back at when the Thomas Dissevelts and Tod Dockstaders of the world wrenched electronic and tape music from the hands of academia and shaped their own futuristic dayglo mushroomscapes and blacklit apocalypses.â€
[Gafne Rostow]
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Fred 'Spaceman' Long and one of his Joker instruments.
Jokers are a series of metallic instruments built by Fred
the Spaceman. All of the Jokers have home-wound magnetic pickups built into them. In Fred's own words, "Jokers evolved from the electric guitar the way synthesizers evolved from the electric organ."
Kwisp performs with several of the Jokers, including Ulysses and Cupid.
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Altered Walter & Prof. Leon Theremin
Picture taken shortly after Professor Lev Sergeevich Termen mysteriously rematerialized in the 3D dimension, after a very long detour with The Kaga Bay .
Soon after, Mr. Termen returned back to the Etherworld .
" Ya potomu takoy zhivuchi, chto moja familiya naoborot chitaetsya 'ne mret' "
