Moral Crayfish is Dan Cohoon and who ever he can sucker in playing with. Moral Crayfish was the name of his sister’s imaginary rock band when she was in college. Brothers Dan & John Cohoon stole the name from her when they entered the battle of the bands in high school. They had discovered that by duct-taping a headphone to the body of their younger sister’s viola and plugging it into the mic jack of a boom box they could get distortion and feedback. They also discovered how to “multi-track†by connecting various boom boxes and audio devices together. The brothers started taping over their parents’ collection of Sermons from their former church, the Alliance Bible Church, in San Antonio to make noise tapes. At this time the brothers had little or no knowledge of avant-garde or underground music. It was with joy and a little disappointment when they first heard the works of such artists as Sonic Youth , Dead C , and Richard Youngs on college radio shows from WVUD & WPRB . It was exciting because these artists were pursuing similar sonic explorations; disappointing because they were not doing anything all that new.
In college a friend gave Dan Cohoon a Sears’s electric guitar that survived a house fire, complete with plastic flowers & 90210 stickers on it. One of the conditions of keeping the guitar was that he was not allowed to remove the stickers. By that time in college he had become interested in the work of John Cage , especially his work with prepared piano. Dan Cohoon started applying the techniques Cage used for his prepared piano on his guitar. He would shove metal and wooden objects into the guitar strings. Using the feedback of the guitar to move the objects would cause a loop. The feedback would cause the objects to move, and the movement would make a sound which would cause the objects to move again. When Dan Cohoon saw Dean Roberts play with his band White Winged Moth his style of guitar playing changed again. Dean Roberts would use a screw driver to twirl against the strings and the body of the guitar. When he adopted his style of playing he learned that you could have a great deal of control with a wider variety of sound possibilities.
His first release featured my own primitive guitar and piano playing, along with field recordings of my family and excerpts from sermon noise tapes he had made in high school. It was called I feel for you, but I can not find you.It was released on Dead-Fish Tapes , a tape-only label run by Jason Cammarata of Goat Boy Sound and Disappointed fame. He recorded Pain’s Temporary Glory on a computer that could barely handle four tracks of audio in Portland, Maine in 1999. The title comes from an interview with BMX freestyler Matt Hoffman, who was quoting Evil Knievel. He misread the quote and thought it said “Pain’s Temporary Glory.†The real quote is “Pain is temporary, glory is forever, and chicks dig scarsâ€
After Portland, Maine he moved out to Portland, Oregon--thus fulfilling a dream of living in two separate cities with the same name in one year. He produced “If you build it, we will burn it ,†using a Sanyo boom box and toy keyboards. Sanyo boom boxes have the ability of playing two tapes at once, which he then dumped to a third tape deck. He borrowed a four track for final mixings, but the majority of the sound was produced using the more archaic multi-tape deck multi-tracking technique. It was released on Mini-Wagonwheel's (of Rollerball Fame) Nilla Cat CD-R label. While in Portland he was also active in the drone universal rock trio the Taken Girls .
In 2003 he moved back to Pennsylvania. Disconnected from an active music scene Cohoon began to concentrate on making sound pieces. The sound pieces still used the prepared guitar as a base but now included house hold objects and small percussion instruments that he manipulate on his laptop. He released several self produced CD-R’s. In 2007 Rumpus Records (from Norway) released The Month of the Dog That year Dan Cohoon also started up his imaginary record label, Field Theory Recordings that has released his latest offering I am fully aware of my own unreality .
Links:
http://www.moralcrayfish.blogspot.com/
http://www.myspace.com/moralcrayfish
http://www.last.fm/music/Moral+Crayfish
http://www.field-theory-recordings.blogspot.com
http://www.ilike.com/artist/Moral+Crayfish
