Though you may not get the full force of his wall-of-sound composition, Primitive Techno, from the video below—given the ambient sound of the ferocious wind blowing through the stationary mics on the camera—you will get the spirit of DIY which Steve and SSB invoke at this outdoor salon performance. There isn’t enough bandwidth on the mesa for Zoom, and anyway, it’s about the intimacy of the live experience and the chance operations that follow from that.
For Primitive Techno, Steve used a malfunctioning 1970s-era A/V turntable that needs quarters on the tone arm to submerge the needle into the grooves of jukebox-salvaged records. Found-sound cassette-tape recordings of a screaming parrot, a palpitating synth, and a saxophone inside a free-jazz garage; a “pocket piano”; and an Alesis SR-16 drum machine complete the sound barrage; with anti-rhythms in primitive-fake-broken-techno style.
Bringing it WAY down, the second half of the program was entirely improv with Steve using bells, sticks, stones, and mesa dirt as his musical matrix. The backdrop sound of contact mics in the grass and trees grounded this performance with the landscape and gently brought salon-goers back to earth.
Many thanks to Derek Caterwaul for filming the performance.