A Tale of Two Cities In the Virtual and Real Worldby Daryl Shawn and Jim Goodin
Living in widely separated cities in different countries, the Chinapainting guitar duo of Jim Goodin and Daryl Shawn met through the Loopers-Delight web community and jammed with one another via the Internet utilizing a program called NinJam. Neither initially imagined that they would eventually meet and perform live in the real world.
Culturally speaking, Brooklyn, New York and Oaxaca, Mexico have precious little in common. Brooklyn is known for its shoulder-to-shoulder brownstones, Spike Lee movies, Saturday Night Fever, and for being the place where the hipsters fled when the cost of renting a Village tenement shot high into the quadruple digits. Oaxaca is hard to pronounce*, remote (it's the only city of any size in the extreme southwestern part of the Mexican state of the same name), and known for its tamales, 30-ingredient mole sauce, and carved wooden figurines. It's also had more than its share of political unrest, which sets the backdrop for the meeting of two musicians who brought these cities together in a most unusual way.
Rewind to September, 2003. Though Daryl Shawn had found a degree of success with various bands in San Francisco, he'd grown tired of indie rock life. So in the fall of 2003, he threw a suitcase and guitar in the back of his pickup and, together with his girlfriend, drove 5,000 miles to Oaxaca. With their carefully hoarded savings, they bought three acres of land, designed a modest house on graph paper, and began to learn about life as expatriates.
Suddenly finding himself without a scene, a band, or even other musicians who spoke his native tongue, Shawn left rock music behind and began to branch out. He rediscovered his flamenco and classical training and began to compose "serious" solo pieces for the first time. In a more experimental vein, he began to explore unusual uses for a four-track cassette recorder, loading it with endless answering machine tapes and using it as a performance instrument instead of a studio tool.
But as Shawn sequestered himself in his room with his simple equipment, a storm was brewing in Oaxaca. Tensions between the rich ruling class and the poor (who draw weekly salaries of $50 or less) grew until things came to a head in June of 2006, when a teachers' summertime demonstration for better wages in the capital city was violently broken up by police. A movement in support of the teachers quickly coalesced, and they soon took over every government building, gained control of media outlets, and brought the capital to a standstill with roadblocks.
Then-President Fox immediately sent thousands of militarized police to the area. Fearing the drive-by shootings by party members and the wanton displays of force by the police, Shawn barred his doors and stayed inside, never emerging except to buy groceries once a week. Stripped of the chance of social interaction via the usual channels, he reached out through the Internet to find like-minded souls.
He soon happened on a community of open-minded musicians through a forum and website known as Looper's Delight, named after the process of "looping", or using devices to repeat and layer sounds or musical phrases, which Shawn had begun to explore with his cassette machine. Shawn soon became very active in the international group's discussions, corresponding regularly with other "loopers" in the United States, Europe and beyond.
Thousands of miles away in Brooklyn, Jim Goodin was also beginning to stretch his boundaries. With a range of influences from his native Arkansas bluegrass and traditional music to free jazz and experimental music, Goodin became a recognized fingerstylist in the folk and Celtic realms with several product endorsements and Mel Bay Publications to his credit. Through his musical journey (initially as a woodwind player) during high school and college years, Goodin was exposed to the music of Michael Hedges in his mid-20's and dedicated himself to the guitar from that point on.
From Bill Frisell to Robin Williamson Goodin absorbed diverse influences from the solo guitar community including jazz and Celtic styles. Eventually, Goodin began to shy away from established structures and his solo guitar pieces evolved in a much more esoteric, free-flowing style, showing the influence of Indian ragas while utilizing a wealth of alternate tunings. He began to explore duo work, generally in the unusual format of acoustic guitar with percussion; He also incorporated extensive tapping and harmonics into his steel-string sound, further augmenting it with effects and delays.
In a casual web search in August 2006, Goodin happened upon an article that Shawn had written about looping with the cassette four-track machine, which included a link to Shawn's blog about moving to Mexico. As much interested in the ex-patriot's international story as his looping technique, Goodin sent a short introductory email. Shawn responded in kind, and soon the pair began a regular correspondence about their journeys in life and music.
Associated with the Looper's Delight website is the International Live Looping Festival, a multi-day event which has taken place each fall in Santa Cruz, CA since 2002. In 2006, the festival featured a virtual "Kyberfest", which took advantage of a new application called Ninjam [www.ninjam.com/ ; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninjam] that allows real-time musical interaction over the Net to facilitate "live performances" of players in distinct geographical locations. Shawn was invited to participate in the Kyberfest as an international guest, and Goodin was soon included as well.
Finding an immediate empathy in their musical approaches, Goodin and Shawn scheduled another online session as a twosome; with their simple instrumentation of two acoustic guitars and Shawn's Tascam four-track, and no written tunes or even discussion of musical direction, they simply played, responding in the moment to what came over the headphones from far away. Even from the first meetings, it was clear that something substantial was happening, and the pair began to "meet" every weekend, always late at night after other work and household responsibilities were addressed.
Recording their sessions with the Ninjam application, by November they had generated hours of material, and released a collection of the best moments, simply titled "Chinapainting", which they had adopted as the name of their collaboration (a reference to the highly detailed, yet conceptually simple nature of their work).
They continued to play every weekend through the winter, and in February they compiled another full-length album, entitled Trick of Amethyst, as part of the Record-Per-Month Challenge which requires musicians to create and record a complete album's worth of music in the year's shortest month.
Based on the strength of their collaboration, the pair broached the idea of moving the project from cyberspace to the real world. Chinapainting made their live debut at Brooklyn's Center for Improvised Music on July 27th, just hours after having met face-to-face for the first time. In the morning, they drove to Woodstock, NY, for a studio session, followed by performances at Vassar College and The Space in Hamden, CT before returning to Brooklyn for one last show together. Shawn was able to enjoy a few more of the fruits of Brooklyn before he left, including midnight sushi and a classic diner breakfast, though it came at the price of a parking ticket ($185, or approximately one month's salary for a journeyman laborer in Oaxaca).
Shawn then returned to Mexico and the duo resumed their weekly playing schedule, though already with plans in place for their next meeting. They'd been invited to appear live as featured artists in the October 2007 Live Looping Festival, and though Jim could take just a few days off from work, they took advantage of the rare opportunity to be in the same place at the same time and booked three other shows, including a concert at the noted Meridian Gallery in San Francisco and the unusual setting of a winery at M2 Wines in Lodi.
What's next for Chinapainting? Look for the release of the recordings made during their summer tour, their first "in-person" CD. Says Goodin of the record and experience:
We found that through doing this record as well as the live shows that things didn't change from our "sense" of music produced via the Net; we just kept going like we had played together live for years. The CD is going to be wonderful, certainly staying close to the core of Daryl's amazing cassette tape loops but equally very guitaristic, at times avant-garde and at times classical in nature.
In the meantime, the pair will continue to meet in the imagined world of cyberspace late at night each weekend, connecting their two distant cities by a thin thread of shared music.
Daryl Shawn composes and records from his home in Oaxaca, Mexico. Most recently he has released a ten-song collection of vocal material and contributed to Germany-based Rainer Straschill's Quelques Papiers D'Abord album as well as several upcoming cassette-only releases on London's Felt Tip Toe label. Currently, he is recording some 40 solo pieces and transcribing Chinese pipa music for guitar.
Jim Goodin lives in the Park Slope area of Brooklyn, NY with his wife Ann and two children, Callie and Jamie. He is a Mel Bay author and has a new book, DADGAD Encyclopedia, due for release soon. Jim has produced several solo and ensemble CD's and is founder of Wood and Wire Music. In addition to house concerts, performances with Chinapainting and solo clinics for GHS Strings and Seagull Guitars, he is currently broadening his sonic palette with explorations on the fretless guitar, electric mandolin and violin.
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