The year that will be is full of mystery, as every good adventure should be....

Land Of The Free, Home Of The Paid

 With 2001 on the wing and 2012 in the wings,  there has never been a better time to to turn someone you love onto the sultry sounds of authentic Sonoran Desert Wall Music...

Narrative, the stories we use to make sense of our world, is reality.

Over the past decade, the most prevalent narrative about the borderlands, and one that has been adopted by politicians and media alike, is a narrative of fear.

This narrative of fear has resulted in billions of taxpayer dollars being spent to build walls, and turn our borderlands into de facto militarized zones patrolled by armed guards and buzzing drones.

But how does this secondhand narrative of fear square with the narrative one actually experiences when traveling in the borderlands?

What if all we have to fear is fear itself?

Late the other night, beneath an almost full moon, I sat upon the front stoop of my home listening to the neighborhood breathe...

A couple of years ago

I found some water bottles

left beside a desert road

by migrants passing through...

Video from the October 21st Nogales Border Wall Sounding....

As a public service to everyone in The Great State of Arizona and elsewhere, today SonicAnta launched a "Brewer Free Zone" at  www.scorpionforbreakfast.com

Since sonicanta.com went live in 2006, the world has been steadily tuning in for the sultry sounds of border wall music and other Sonoran Desert aural explorations...

For nearly four decades local historians and music scholars have wrestled with the facts  surrounding the founding of this enigmatic group that is now legendary among those who lust for bike-born sound.

Along the way there were many whispers and rumors among collectors of a Bikeastra Holy Grail --- a storage locker full of material from the band's earliest days.

Now, after years of speculation the Holy Grail has been found....

As a condition of employment I recently signed the State of Arizona Loyalty Oath.

The very notion of a loyalty oath for educators has at best a chilling effect upon free thinking and expression.

Can we really trust a journalist to be fair and accurate when he/she is taking a loyalty oath to the state?

Today is the birthday of Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer, one of the leading pioneers of soundscape exploration and appreciation.

It also happens to be World Listening Day...

Back in 2007 or so I had an idea.

What would happen if you taught people the basics about building musical instruments from scrap bike parts then turned them loose?

Where would they take it?

How far would it go?

Old Nogales Wall Playing on the big screen in Tucson...

DEAD LINKS ME THINKS

Faced with an abundance of unexpected free time, I decided to take a trip to the border for one last sounding of the Nogales Wall (W6 Section) before they began tearing it down. 

Instead of playing the wall as I’d often done in the past, this final time I decided to make two simple recordings...

When The Anta Project began, it was always my hope the wall could be transformed from a symbol of fear and loathing into something which would create beauty and communication...

They were the same people you will find anywhere on the planet, simply going about their days on a warm Saturday, trying to create a better society and a better world...

...nothing...

!HAPPY NEW EARS!

Steev turned left, heading north towards the main visitor center, past an ominous white t-shirt tied to a tree, and smack into the camp of three Guardsmen, dressed in uniform who were busy grabbing their M-16's and charging towards us, ordering us to halt.

Which, it goes without saying, Steev did...

Just imagine the business potential for developing canine border control solutions.

It's dizzying, the possibilities...

Tired of those same old vibrations?
Looking to spice-up your listening pleasure a bit?
Then try: Tucson Orchestrated.
It's in your grocer's freezer.

What was heard, what was not...

I saw the worst minds of their degeneration destroyed by SB1070,  gluttonous hysterical overly clothed, dragging themselves through the Spanish-named streets at dawn looking for an angry border fix...

This past weekend I traveled through the borderlands with Margaret Randall and Barbara Byers, from Nogales to Sasabe, over rolling hills and through numerous checkpoints...

Built without a net, I anticipate this event will take us to some interesting vistas...

She'd become a ghost river passing through sand, dislodging a grain here and there, heard on the recordings as occasional clicks...

Sound into Money into Food...

OLD TAPES, A GOOD DOG AND A NEW YEAR SOUNDING

Of what value is this? Water jugs beside the road, scattered behind barbed wire fences...

In Tucson there is a river called the Rillito. Thing is, it's a river without a river...

On the first night I'd gone off wandering into a field near the woods on the White Mountain Apache Reservation where we camped...

A world where everyone is a musician and all sounds are valid may be closer than we know...

After nearly four years of sonically transforming the border...

I love the idea of creating a vibrant and vital Downtown Tucson.

But lately it is becoming clear some sort of schizophrenic planning madness has taken hold of the powers that be...

At that hour of the morning when Nogales is just waking up, the sound environment is rich with barking dogs, human voices, rooster crows, peacock screeches, puffs of wind, raucous birds, rumbling vehicles and droning construction...

Still, the agent said he and his partner thought I looked suspicious.

Like a Russian, he said.

Or perhaps someone with some outstanding warrants.

Of doldrums and monsoon lilies...

Pedaling through waves of cicada drones and rising heat, following the monsoon clouds just above the horizon, I find myself listening and drifting thinking: It was a good day to sound. A good day to jar... 

Then my signal dealer comes by telling me he has this new digital stuff he wants me to try.

Dusted and dirty it began ticking right away with a quick wind...

No, the government sanitized the Wild West of those threats long ago...

Imagine a guitar player who has no knowledge of what a piano is improvising for the first time with a pianist who has never heard of a guitar.

It was something like that...

Nice acoustics and plenty of irony considering that today the Soviet Union is a ghost, many of the countries listed on the memorial are democratic or headed that way, the Berlin Wall has become a souvenir item for tourists and America is building a literal iron curtain of her own along the southern border...

Actually, that’s the awkward adult way of describing it...

Behind our Tucson home hangs a silent bell...

Downtown Tucson is a waiting place these days, haunted by the ghosts of Glorious Expectations...

The desert has fleeting seasons and there are barren times when the mind wonders about other places to be...

Right now, in this moment that was, it is raining outside. And that is all that matters...

If you've never been, the newly built Trader Joe's is spacious, clean, well stocked and ripe with that patented nautical theme the chain is famous for...

We're all in bubbles of our own design, connecting with what we suppose is real, dealing with the realities we can handle and blocking the overload...

I come from an age of smoking in newsrooms, typewriters, phoning in stories from pay phones and drinking in the press room after the paper hit the stands...

Naturally in an environment such as this, the visual is matched and perhaps even surpassed by the audio... 

Well there it is. A brief history of Prepping Finger Salad. Much more to tell and hear but more some other time. I have laundry to do...

An ant makes its way home...

Empty store fronts full of faded possibility, some still bearing the names of former tenants, line the corridors, their pitches hollow and forgotten...

Have you ever found yourself wandering about strange in a stranger land?

So this is how further more officially staggers forward...

Leave only footprints. Take only sounds.