My name's Penny Less (shorthand: -$.01), and I specialize in making garbage pretty. I am a trash necromancer, communicating with dead waste to predict the future. Sha-ZAM! Okay, so I'm not that freaky about it. Although reviving trash has always fascinated me, it's been only recently that I have dedicated my music to exploring - and, oftentimes, exploiting - the metaphorical meaning of rubbish.
It all started at an open mic eight months ago in Duluth. I was low on original song material and had parted ways with all my musical instruments. On a whim, I said, "I need a jazzy guitar player to get up here on stage with me. Just improvise." It took about five minutes, but some dude finally approached the stage. He comped with a few easy, breezy chords while I fetched one of those free crummy weekly rags from a table and went into a silky, Astrid Gilberto bossa nova whisper: "LONELY IN CELL 16:
Currently incarcerated SBM ISO pleasantly plump lady(ies). Age, race, unimportant. Reply to Box 26048."
An audience member jokingly (?) grabbed a pen in her purse and the napkin on the adjacent table.
The ease of the bossa nova segued into a punk funk scowl as I perused the trite classifieds for twelve more minutes. I closed with a bluesy howl that sent more than one audience member home, a fact I'm sometimes validated by. The remaining audience was left dumbfounded - perhaps taken aback - but I knew this was something Duluth needed, a city with more homogeneous mass than cottage cheese.
Daily Dumpster Dives followed that performance. I've encountered a boatload of Grandma's Marathon request forms (Canal Park, second Dumpster from Little Angies), a little girl's diary, field notebooks, albums, a red rotary telephone, boxes of ethernet cables. Most have been sung about or thrown at audience members at open mics and gigs since that fateful night of Weekly Reader Classifieds.
About the music: I did a full-length album under the name DJ Duh when I was 19 and two tracks - "Old-School Stereo Flow" and "At 19, Part II" are featured here. Those were the days when I was rockin' the 1200s and playing banjo! And, of course, funk guitar. The other two - "Soul Brother '73" and "Pada Kisha" (Serbo-Croatian for "it's raining') I recorded in 2006 as Blank Paiges' Power Plant.
This just in. . .I am now in South Dakota and getting back into the groove! That is all. Please write me with all the new and cool musical/artistic goings-on.
