Tim Nelson

Sunyata
AmalgamDecember 25th, 1969: After months of wheedling my parents, and with a mere week to go in "The Sixties", I received my first six-string guitar, a plastic-bodied, plastic-stringed, sort-of Stratocaster-shaped brown sunburst thing which was quickly set aside when, having proven my mettle by mastering the chord changes to 'Pollywollydoodle', I commandeered my father's Kingston acoustic (likewise a sunburst) which, having steel strings and actual tuning machines, held its intonation much better and was easier on all ears in the vicinity.
Around the same time, realizing that it would give us just that little extra edge of coolness we found desirable, a friend from school and I decided to start a band. He had two older brothers who had some gear in their basement; my friend claimed the drum throne as his rightful spot, while the instrument made available to me was a strange ultra-short-scaled bass which had been converted from an electric six-string guitar and was just the right size for my seven-year-old fingers. And best of all, it plugged into a great big amplifier! Alternating between acoustic six-string at home, spinet piano downstairs when nobody was home to complain about it, electric bass when jamming at my friend's house and a brief flirtation with the slide trombone in the school band (after the orthodontist kiboshed my first choice of the saxophone, saying that it would give me buck teeth), the stage was set for a musical multiple personality disorder that has stayed with me ever since, a syndrome some one-dimensional, shallow, non-multi-instrumentalists refer to not without derision as "Brian Jones-itis", a pathological need to play ALL the instruments without necessarily mastering any of them. Anyway, I enjoy it.
As the 1970's continued, I found myself continuing to switch between guitar and bass as a member of a succession of groups, some without actual fixed bandnames or musician rosters and others with names reflecting the spirit of the age, gems with such mystical overtones as 'Osiris', 'Arkenstone' and 'Pyramid'. It was as lead guitarist/vocalist of the latter group that I first became fully aware of the powerful influence being a musician could have on one's social life, as we and our rivals 'Tyrant' strove for dominance as the two biggest fish in the very, very small pond of our high school.
My college years (University of New Hampshire, '84) were a time of expanding horizons, as I was simultaneously discovering home recording experimentation, the techniques of Fripp & Eno, and the fact that free improvisation a la Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd in many cases obviated the need for boring rehearsal of repertoire. I worked as a sideman bassist and guitarist in the Holly Durniak Group (a singer-songwriter/pianist managed by the same guy who managed Barry Manilow) and played bass and wore a skinny tie in the power-pop outfit The Heat. By 1982, I was riding the first wave of neo-psychedelia as bassist/vocalist for the Spontaneous Abstraction, a group which later morphed into the psych-prog Urth. It was during this period that the infamous Timothy Leary, remarking on the fact that we had the same first name, told me that I had "a lot to live up to" and laughed perhaps a bit too heartily when I in knee-jerk style responded without the slightest bit of forethought "Some might construe that as arrogance."
After Urth disbanded, I was the bassist/vocalist/sometime keyboardist for a series of well-intentioned but poorly-organised prog bands with shifting membership, no fixed names (I think we were The Iguanadons at one point) and very high levels of both technical aspiration and pretension.
I spent the five years following college as a world traveller (ie. doing military service) while I continued my musical endeavors with a 4-track recorder and Nick Drake-esque solo acoustic performances in California, Texas, Hawaii, Japan and Turkey. It was during this time that I began my collection of indigenous musical instruments (see column at left), and wrote and recorded many of the demos that would later appear in the Heavens To Murgatroid repertoire.
After leaving the US Navy in 1990, thankfully without any anchor tattoos, I continued to record 4-track demos, and was the bassist/vocalist for the short-lived alternative group Squirtgun. Working as a graphic artist, I became involved with the power-pop group Heavens To Murgatroid shortly before they temporarily disbanded in the summer of 1991, at which time two of the original members immediately regrouped as The Bumping Uglies with a new drummer and with me on lead guitar. Fortunately, we never gigged under this awful name, realizing that HtM's substantial regional fanbase, the boxes of t-shirts and stickers in our bass player's closet and the existing distribution deal with Minneapolis's ProSpective Records made it much more sensible for us to continue as Heavens To Murgatroid.
After a couple of very busy years of regional success and following a national tour in our hot-pink tour bus in support of the album "!", I left Heavens To Murgatroid. For the next year, I did not play stringed instruments at all, and studied Native American flute and the classical honkyoku repertoire of the shakuhachi. In the mid-90's I sort of almost nearly began a new project with Dave Hunter (ex-Drugstore guitarist, now with the Molenes) which was shelved when he returned to London, but at least it got me playing again.
Soon I found myself involved with a prog-electronica ensemble with much in common with the prog bands I'd played with around '84-'85: there was a lot of potential but no discipline, and the roster was subject to the same continual revolving door. We were all multi-instrumentalists, so there were rehearsals where we'd ALL show up with the same instrument; at one point, we were ostensibly a guitar-bass-drums trio, but we'd all show up with synthesizers instead. It was fun, and there was some interesting music, but it was doomed. Through this association, I worked a bit with Nate Groth (Intelevision, Ardent Ways, Hotel Alexis, Northern, etc.) and first met Michael Deragon (Prajna, The Water Section, The Great Invisibles) with whom I didn't actually play a show until May, 2006!
It was around this time (1998) that, using digital looping technology, I again began to perform semi-regularly doing solo electric improvised ambient soundscapes using a variety of different instruments. I was a featured performer at the 'Sonic Blender' event held in 2003 at Cambridge's Zeitgeist Gallery; my set was filmed and televised to the Boston area as part of a program which asked the question 'Is Electronic Music the End of the Big Band?' I'm not sure what the answer to that question turned out to be...
In early 1999 I co-founded the Chain Tape Collective, a worldwide, internet-based group of experimental musicians who have regularly released compilation CD's, all of which may be downloaded in their entirety (including the full CD graphics) from our website. Compositions I've done for CT projects have been featured on Italian National Radio as well as on the Eldorado programme of Sveriges Radio (Swedish National Radio). The CT Collective is fairly prolific, with about 20 CD's out so far, and more in production as I type. We're always open to new membership, so if you're an interested/interesting musician, please visit the site. And bring some friends with you.
From late 1999, I've been a member of Brainfood, an on-again-off-again improvised psych-prog loop-heavy instrumental project comprised of former members of the early-80's lineup of Urth. Brainfood has an interesting structure; it's either a three-member duo or a two-member trio, depending on which way you look at it. The way it works is that any two of the three members constitute a quorum and can perform as Brainfood; when all three of us perform together, which is extremely rarely, we call it 'Brainfood Plus'.
Since around 2001, I've been loosely associated with BuTcH, the project of Butch Heilshorn (ex- 5 Balls of Power, Jim Jones & the Guyanas, BobHouse, Hemicuda, Moonking and the former honcho of PlayHard Records), appearing live in a lineup which also featured Dustin Ruoff (Minds of Minolta, Mosfet) and possibly somewhere on CD, although with BuTcH's CD's it's sometimes hard to tell who's on there when it finally comes out of the cuisinart.
From late 2001 until early 2002, my guitar, electronics and I were part of the short-lived original lineup of According To My Dream.
Early 2006 finds me simultaneously releasing not one but TWO CD's, a few tracks of which may be downloaded above. 'Rantai' consists of material recorded in association with the Chain Tape Collective. About 1/3 of the album is previously released material, another 1/3 is older material that was recorded for CT albums but never released or which has been remixed drastically, and the remaining 1/3 is new material with some connection to the Chain Tape Collective (such as the cello and percussion track 'Orphans Among Strangers'). Incidentally, the cover art is an extreme closeup of a Russian-made pocketwatch chain, and is NOT a depiction of worms, sausages, intestines or anything nasty like that.
The second new CD is called 'Mesh'. The album was originally conceived to coincide with a gallery opening commemorating a 30-year retrospective show of the Metalsmithing program of a prominent art college, but when the opening was reorganized around another venue, I was left with 48 minutes of new music that early reviews have described as 'powerful' and 'cinematic'. The CD retains its metallurgical connection in that all of the titles are terms from metalsmithing, most of them double entendres.
Most recently, I've been collaborating with Michael Deragon of The Great Invisibles with whom I played the second show in the Sotto Voce series (see link in my Friends list) which combines live musical performance with the works of avant-garde filmmaker Michael Winters.