I’ve been having a hell of a good time working with Dan and Jeff on this Fetal Pig reunion show. If you heard the tracks from their cassette EP I posted a while back and thought those were something, they don’t quite do justice to the material we’ve been working up. Seems Fetal Pig had a pretty productive period writing songs after coming out with that tape, and we’re doing a set that pulls pretty heavily from that stuff. And that stuff takes the heavy prog angle of the band a few steps further yet. It’s really expanding my bass vocabulary in ways that I hope will come out in future projects.

Distant Trains was actually going to perform live! There was an early show scheduled at the Mews with My Empty Phantom and Blutiger Fluss next month, but My Empty Phantom canceled so the whole show was scrapped. My plan was to do kinda much like what my solo shows have been in the past, except with bass instead of guitar. I think it’s a good outlet for the heavy intense side of what I’d been working on, whereas I plan to also do a more folky thing, without the drum machine, as just Chuck Hoffman. Might get myself an acoustic guitar for that eventually.

Anyway that’s pretty much all I have right now. I have a bunch of albums that have come out recently that I want to write about, and probably will soon, once I get a couple more listens of them in.

From Fall of 2003 for a couple years after, sometimes off-and-on, I was in this far-out improvisational/noise/post-rock band with musical inventor Tom Vanderwall and drummer/pedal steel guitarist Phil Sterk, at that time best known for his work with A Is Jump and Why Make Clocks. We put out some CD-Rs, had some cool t-shirts, played some shows. I still occasionally hear from someone who really dug what we were up to, often wondering where they can still get our recordings. Now you can get them here. Check the new “Albums” link up in the main nav above.