The JSH Combo

Transient Phenomena

2010-10-28T21:25:00.002-04:00

Let's just say, for the sake of argument, that humans actually traveled to the moon in the 1930s. And let's just say, playing devil's advocate, that they found a phonograph record there. And let us just say, merely speculating on a hypothesis, that they played it and this is what they heard.

Super Snack Pack 5000

2010-10-26T20:47:00.004-04:00

Music for a future age - don't be square, be there. We're on the outside but we're not looking in. So unplug the jukebox and do us all a favor, that music's lost its taste so try another flavor.

Carnival Tunnel Syndrome, Ford

2010-10-25T08:13:00.004-04:00

Two more segments of sediment from my laptop to your life - "Carnival Tunnel Syndrome" is a loaf of soft gloom that settles gently on your face and penetrates it, while "Ford" is simply a brief snippet of Gerald Ford doing what Gerald Ford did best - being impenetrable.

Vegetable Mineral

2010-10-23T10:50:00.003-04:00

Yes, it's another pointless piece of pretentious plunkery from the Jeffrey Scott Holland Research Farm - collect all 1,000,000!

This one is called "Vegetable Mineral" and the management is not responsible for any subconscious restimulative disturbances to your nervous system while listening to it under headphones.

In fact, the management isn't really responsible, period.

Pig-Bristle Brush

2010-10-21T10:55:00.001-04:00

It's guaranteed to make your hair stand straight up like one. Or your money back. Or maybe not. Oh, just click here.

Liquor Store Lights

2010-10-19T10:10:00.004-04:00

As with Esquivel's See It In Sound, this bit of experimental ambient-noise is a tonal representation recording sonic impressions of many a misspent moment hurtling in an inebriated state through the murk of the mountainous night, dulled visual receptors scanning the blurred noctural landscape and seeking that light at the end of the tunnel that turns out to be an oncoming liquor store. Okay, actually, I'm totally making this up as I go along. But click here anyhow.

Two More Kentuckians Tracks

2010-10-12T17:54:00.005-04:00

Two more Kentuckians tracks have made the jump to lightspeed: "Cheapskates" and "Next Exit".

"Cheapskates" was recorded at Otto Helmuth's Blueberry Way studios in Lexington, KY for the primary Join Our Militia sessions. It's a highly mutated cover of the Clash song from Give 'em Enough Rope. In the rush to get 'er done, the song went to the CD hardly mixed at all, creating lots of minor idiosyncracries in retrospect - the first word of the song, "I", is practically inaudible, the bass line is mixed too quietly, and the drone-guitar overdub goes in and out like the tide.

"Next Exit" is actually an demo outtake from the sessions for my solo album This Ain't No Rave, recorded alone in my garage in Berea, KY. It appeared as the final cut on most copies of Join Our Militia (Some copies had an acoustic demo of "The Girl From Disputanta" instead).

Alkaloid Nightdrive, Creeps Mountain

2010-10-02T20:57:00.002-04:00

Two more nuggets of noise from the sonic research nerve center of my undisclosed location: the overachieving "Alkaloid Nightdrive" and the understated "Creeps Mountain". Share and enjoy.

Standing Wave

2010-10-01T00:01:00.004-04:00

Another installment in the neverending series of experimental art-noise ambient recordings, direct from my wine cellar to your cerebellum - collect 'em all.

"Standing Wave" is an audio collage of several different mystery transmissions culled from the shortwave radio band, combined with secret ingredients and special sauce.

Gone Fishin'

2010-09-28T10:39:00.004-04:00

My old band The Kentuckians is the latest to receive the YouTube treatment on the Transylvania Colony channel. This is "Gone Fishin'", a straight-ahead garage-a-billy number whose lyrics are all about Owsley Fork Reservoir, one of my secret hiding places when I needed to pull a Joe Strummer vanishing act and get the fuck out of Dodge to go depressurize and pull the big straw hat over my eyes.

Also check out "The Girl from Disputanta" and the previously-unreleased unfinished track "He's Got a Way with Women". More Kents tracks are forthcoming....

International Incident

2010-09-26T00:08:00.001-04:00

The flood of pretentious art-noise-boinkery from JSH HQ continues unabated! Just days on the heels of the new track "Circumstances" comes yet another new internet-only FREE slice of slop, entitled "International Incident". Recognize the samples and win absolutely nothing!

A Jug's Life

2010-09-25T20:14:00.009-04:00

Some crappy old recordings of Holland's Jug Stompers (my abysmally inept jug band from 1998-1999) are now resurrected for the 21st century via the blessing/curse that is YouTube. You needn't actually listen to them; just know that they exist and that we had a really good time torturing our hippie audiences at Berea College with our slovenly, spontaneous and unrehearsed avant-garde hi-jinks. But if you insist, you may find four of them online so far: "Hello Josephine", "Come Back to your Kentucky", "Naked on the Railroad Tracks", and "Rainstorm Creeps".

And if that doesn't completely kill any curiosity you may have had about this band, you can also read some recollections and reminiscences about those grand productive days here and also here.

("Yeah, but... but... what about the JSH Combo, JSH?", I hear you cry. Well, be warned: our latest relaunch of ourselves is underway, please stand by. "Hold on", as Paul Stanley once said, "the roller coaster is about to begin.")

Circumstances

2010-09-22T17:30:00.004-04:00

The time has come at last: another new free snippet of avant-garde twaddle from the subterranean recesses of my wine cellar/studio - a little something we like to call "Circumstances". Thank you very much.

Corn Syrup Sunrise

2010-09-07T00:34:00.001-04:00

A brand-new chunk of ambient slush from the JSH Research Kitchens - "Corn Syrup Sunrise" free for the world on this here crazy internet-within-an-internet they call the youtube.

Creamy Blood Cells

2010-09-06T09:31:00.001-04:00

Another puzzling piece of noise-chill from JSH Labs is up on youtube - "Creamy Blood Cells".

Slouching Towards Lexington

2010-09-03T02:10:00.002-04:00

Okay, so it isn't the JSH Combo, but some tracks from my on-the-side deal as a purveyor of mildly pretentious avant-garde/industrial/ambient/chill sounds will be gradually oozing out on the new Transylvania Colony youtube site.

This one, "Slouching Towards Lexington", was recorded in 2008 for a never-released album for Superfrothco on the USB Flash Drive format.

However, take heart, actual JSH Combo recordings are coming to youtube soon as well....

Music for Medieval Clown Puppets

2009-11-05T16:00:00.000-05:00

The JSH Combo will be recording a musical score for the Catclaw Theatre production of Shakespeare's Birth of Merlin, which rocks NYC next month. The music will be an avant-garde mishmash of influences from Karlheinz Stockhausen to KISS. Watch this space for mp3 sneak previews!

Piano Concerto for Left Hand

2009-09-17T00:26:00.000-04:00

I'm currently obsessed by this recording of Ravel's Piano Concerto for Left Hand by the great Alfred Cortot. Look for unabashedly sycophantic emulation of this style by the JSH Combo at a roadhouse saloon near you soon!

Holding Pattern

2009-07-16T19:23:00.000-04:00

Summer's half blown by and this hasn't turned out to be the summer that the JSH Combo healed the sick, raised the dead, made the little girls talk out of their heads. But patience, faithful ones, that's all about to change real soon. A film project featuring the Combo is in the works from a Los Angeles filmmaker, and this will force us to get it in gear. Also, the new KISS album, Sonic Boom is coming out later this year, and there's nothing the anticipation of new KISS music to put a spring in a step and a fire in my flue. Please stand by, ladies and gentlemens, there's gonna be some rockin'.

Anton LaVey Quote of the Day

2009-03-03T00:42:00.000-05:00

"If I didn't have these keyboards I don't know what I'd do. It's the one thing that acts as a kind of an anchor. When someone starts minimizing me, and I hear it so much that I start believing it myself, I can sit at these keyboards and do things that no one else can do: remember songs that no one else remembers, play songs in a way that they aren't played anymore." - Anton LaVey.

A-432

2009-01-17T01:22:00.000-05:00

Heard about the controversy surrounding modern society's current practice of tuning all instruments to A-440?

After reading a number of experts and their back and forth arguments on the matter, and after some experiments of my own, I've come to the conclusion that the movement to revert back to A-432 is a sound one.

A number of fringe groups also champion the growing A-432 movement for various reasons - some New Agers think it enhances "superconsciousness", and some right-wing conspiracy theorists believe the push for A-440 has to do with a century-old mind control plot.

Me, I think it just plain sounds better.

According to an article in the New York Times:

A little-known New Jersey opera company is playing an active role in an international debate to lower the reference pitch by which orchestras tune their instruments. The issue is that the reference pitch, the tone A, has gradually risen over the last 200 years and the consequences may be severe for performers and instruments.

The A used by most symphony and opera orchestras today for uniform tuning ranges between 440 hertz, or cycles per second, to 444 hertz. By comparison, in 1740, Handel favored an A pitched at 422 hertz. Mozart, in 1780, tuned to an A at 421.6 hertz. The French standardized their A at 435 hertz in 1858. A little more than 20 years later, Verdi succeeded in getting a bill passed by the Italian Parliament to tune at A 432 hertz.

In 1938, an international standard for A was set at 440 hertz, but the pitch continued to rise. The New York Philharmonic, under Zubin Mehta, tunes to an A at 442 hertz, as does the Chicago under Georg Solti and the Boston Symphony under Seiji Ozawa. In Berlin, orchestras tune to an A around 448 hertz. In Moscow, the symphony's pitch is even higher, near 450 hertz.

''This is a scientific as well as an artistic issue,'' [Jeanne Percesepe] said. ''Verdi worked with scientists and, based on certain harmonic principles, decided on what the scientific tuning should be. At the higher pitch, you tend to have more strident tones. Body and resonance is lost in the middle and chest registers. Music performed at the lower pitch heightens the poetry and drama. Verdi, Beethoven and Bellini understood that the voice had fundamental characteristics that should not be tampered with.''

If it was good enough for Verdi, it's good enough for me. I'm looking into the JSH Combo performing in the original pre-modern-era tuning of A-432 for shows and recordings in 2009. Let us know what you think of this experiment!

Who are the Jeffrey Scott Holland Combo?

2008-12-27T13:15:00.000-05:00

Imagine an act that combines Jazz's earliest Dixieland/Swing days with the later "difficult" free-jazz experimentation of Cecil Taylor and John Zorn, and chooses to completely ignore all that Miles/Bird/Coltrane stuff in the middle.

Imagine if Thelonious Monk harbored not-so-secret adoration of Martin Denny, Floyd Cramer, B.Bumble & the Stingers, and Liberace.

Imagine a Tony Clifton that isn't a joke, a saloon singer that isn't intended as kitsch or camp, a "lounge act that transcendeth all knowing", in the words of Nick Tosches.