Sean Ongley

Category: Audio

  • New Synth Jam

    New Synth Jam

    HEAR AUDIO IN NEW TAB.

    Please enjoy the dusty electronic noise produced herein. Dusty from sitting inside its case for five years, and performed by a dusty player. I could not remember how to do things I used to readily perform. Additionally, I cut myself off from music during this time that I’ve been writing about lately, moving to Philadelphia and squaring off my financial basis for the first time in my adult life.

    I think this track proves that I haven’t gone soft. I still got the guts of the experimental, improvising musician in me. And it feels so good to just produce something. I don’t care how many mistakes I made in the process — the piece is kind about that.

    At this point, I have a secure home music studio that I can use 24/7. I can afford at least an hour per day on average to work on music. I still have work to do in the studio, to make it a functional studio. This piece is just the maiden voyage. It’s going to get so much better.

    Performed with an ARP Odyssey mk2 vintage, and Logic Studio instruments.

  • The Broken Armed Drummer

    The Broken Armed Drummer

    “Luna’s Broken Arms” from The Growth Years by Death Worth Living

    Recorded Live at Luna’s Cafe, Sacramento, spring 2007

    Steven “Shane” Schneider aka Pixie Storm aka Reverend Papa Sweat, was a primary source of ambience and spontaneity, drumming and percussion, in the improvisational super group that I led from 2007 to 2011, Death Worth Living.

    This performance took place 24 hours following a terrible accident in which Shane dropped eight feet down through an opening to a llama stable, because Shane was feeding the llamas, because we both lived on this farm on the edge of Portland, Oregon, in 2007.

    Shane was already kind of feeble, elderly, and weakened due to a life of great times, strenuous activity, and the onset of Parkinson’s Disease (he was not quite yet diagnosed) and previous injuries and surgeries that bothered him, so he had vicodin and weed. We did not go to the doctor.

    My bandmate at the time Joe helped set up a few shows in Sacramento and Davis. We are in Luna’s Cafe, Sacramento, 2007, and a Sony MiniDisc recorder is keeping the memory.

    We encountered some mushrooms from a backwoods type of dude in central Oregon, and we bought them. We later took them, with ground nutmeg in the form of tea, and performed our show.

    This is the audio of that performance, where Shane has a badly damaged arm, is delirious from vicodin, weed, and mushrooms. I too must have been on another planet as I had been driving all day, stoned, and also on mushrooms.

    Shane is the only member that played in my first show, and last. This is on a Bandcamp collection (there was a small handmade CD-R run) called The Growth Years.

  • Robert McChesney and John Nichols Interview

    Robert McChesney and John Nichols Interview

    It was a spring morning in 2016 and there was an omen on my path to make this interview with Robert McChesney and John Nichols, at Hotel Deluxe in Portland, Oregon. They agreed to an interview if I could meet them on their way out the door, in the lobby.

    I woke up in the morning to a landslide that blocked my usual route to St. Helen’s Highway, to downtown early to set up the gear. I made it to a road block and had to reverse course and take the high road to drop down Burnside. The scheduling was already tight, I was setting up my recording equipment in the car.

    I walked into the hotel with my microphones and recorder hot and rolling. I start this interview out of breath and anxious.

    This kind of foreshadowed the reality that was to manifest by the fall of that year: Donald Trump would win a landslide of electoral votes, forcing the left to double back and find a new strategy to reform the dangerously teetering American project.

    The event is also allegorical to the subject of the book, People Get Ready: The Fight Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless Democracy, as we are going down a path that will be obstructed sooner or later, and we may have to start a recourse before we know its coming.

    I am proud of this interview and grateful that these guys, who are well known authors and progressive figures, would join me on my little podcast. I never read the book, they didn’t offer a copy. But it’s probably a good read.

    At the time of this interview, the podcast was called Horizon at End Times, but it was published by THRU Media. Intro music courtesy of New Amsterdam Records, composed by Qasim Naqvi.

  • T:BA Revived Washington High School in 2009

    T:BA Revived Washington High School in 2009

    The inaugural year of the reopening of Washington High School in Southeast Portland, Oregon, was carried out by none other than Portland Institute for Contemporary Art as part of the Time-Based Art Festival. The following comes from two interviews conducted at the site for a radio special on KBOO Community Radio, which aired in September, 2009. The interview begins with Fawn Krieger.

    Interviews with Fawn Krieger and Jesse Hayward for T:BA 2009

    In the context of a live broadcast, the audio above is only an excerpt of the original program, which is not included here.

    Washington High School remained occupied by PICA for four more years, atypical of the moveable feast that is The Works, a nightly cabaret that caps off each day’s program.


    Fawn pictured me standing with her laptop to offload our interview audio.
  • A Shingle Drone

    A Shingle Drone

    Featured Image is a Self-Portrait

    “A Shingle Drone” Produced winter 2012.

    One evening in the winter of 2012, in the hills of Shingle Springs, California, this drone piece was improvised into my mobile studio. The performers are Myself, Jean-Paul Jenkins, and Megan McIsaac. We were guests in a distraught house with no running water, just electricity, and scant mobile coverage. This piece speaks to that. We had honestly been pushing for recordings with too much headiness. Too much ambition. This one happened naturally.

    It’s almost twenty minutes in length, and the arch it takes on is only accessible in real-time. It works great for sitting down and reading a book, doing yoga, and stuff like that.

    Instruments involved in this recording include Arp Odyssey Mk2, electric guitar, autoharp, pedal electronics, and Ableton Live.