From Aural Innovations #34 (August 2006)
When I first interviewed Don Falcone in 1998, I did so on the strength of his two Spaceship Eyes CDs - Kamarupa and Truth in the Eyes of a Spaceship (see AI #4). And then, seemingly out of nowhere, Don's output increased with a stunning variety of projects, including Spirits Burning, Quiet Celebration, Fireclan, Weird Biscuit Teatime, another Spaceship Eyes release, the release of an older unreleased Thessalonians album, a collaboration with Stephen Palmer (Mooch, Blue Lily Commission), and.... I've surely forgotten something! Having been immersed in Don's music over the years it seemed appropriate to revisit him for a more in-depth conversation. The following interview was conducted by phone from the Aural Innovations headquarters in Ohio to Don's home in California.
Aural Innovations (AI): Regarding your early ambient days, I was browsing a web site with information on Silent Records and saw this line… "Don released full length albums and individual tracks for Silent under the names Thessalonians, Spice Barons, Satellite IV, Patternclear, Hydrosphere, Astralfish, and so on. Were albums released under these names? Were they one shots?
Don Falcone (DF): There were 3 CDs on Silent. The first one was Thessalonians "Soulcraft". That was with Kim Cascone, Larry Thrasher, Paul Neyrinck and two other people. At some point after that came out we ended up becoming a 3-piece with Kim, myself and Paul Neyrinck. From there we continued on and put out a CD called UFA, or Unidentified Floating Ambience. And for each piece we took a different name. So there was a piece by Hydrosphere, a couple pieces by Spice Barons, a couple pieces by Patternclear, and one piece or two by Astralfish. I'm not sure that was the best way of doing it. We may have confused a lot of people who probably thought it was a compilation. But that was the second CD. From there was finally settled on who this trio was going to be and we did Spice Barons. So that was the third CD. At that point we started recording a new Thessalonians CD, and Larry came back on board and the four of us completed the material. At the time it was going to come out there was a lot going on with the distributor for Silent, and Kim decided to concentrate more on a solo career and also get out of the business… he was running Silent Records. So once he sold Silent and the new person picked it up, we couldn't reach an agreement to release the second Thessalonians CD. And that CD ("Solaristics") was put out by Noh Poetry a year ago. So you could say there were four CDs from that period. And then we were on a lot of compilations that Silent put out.
AI: So these band names that I listed, those are different configurations of the same people?
DF: Of the 3-piece. The only other thing I could add to that is, at the first moment that we were a 3-piece, when Thessalonians still existed, there was a compilation being put together called "50 Years of Sunshine", to celebrate LSD. I actually got a Harvey Bainbridge track from one of his solo CDs on it. And there's a Hawkwind piece, and Timothy Leary's on it. And we did a piece and called ourselves Satellite IV. So that was actually the original name of the 3-piece. Then we did the UFA thing with all the different names and finally settled on Spice Barons.
AI: Was this all still early 90's, mid 90's?
DF: The "Solaristics" was probably '95-'96. When I put out the Spaceship Eyes "Kamarupa" CD that was pretty much at the tail end of it.
AI: When I first started communicating with you was right around when Kamarupa first came out. And when I look back at what ended up being 3 Spaceship Eyes CDs, they're all very different from one another. You had the Tangerine Dreamy "Kamarupa", and then the drum 'n bass and techno elements in "Truth in the Eyes of a Spaceship", and "Of Cosmic Repercussions" went into a variety of directions.
DF: The Silent stuff were ambient projects. Silent was an ambient label. When I did "Kamarupa" I think it was in reaction to… I wanted it to be kind of ambient, but at the same time I wanted to have melody. There was a tendency for the Silent stuff not to really have melody. The other thing was I was done with Melting Euphoria. I can't say those were ideas I would have presented to Melting Euphoria. But I was still doing rock stuff. The second and third CDs were both for Cleopatra. And Cleopatra had asked me to do a drum 'n bass CD. And I ended up listening to a guy named DJ Hype. I was heavily influenced by him. He used samples in a much weirder way than the Silent projects had. So I thought, let's take that and really run with it, and I did. And the third CD was almost a strange attempt to bring the first 2 together, but lean towards the second one. So in my mind I'm kind of doing electronica but with a little bit of progressive elements. I'm proud of all three of them, for different reasons, but I think there's some moments on "Of Cosmic Repercussions" that are like nothing I'd ever heard before.
AI: Speaking of Melting Euphoria, the reissue of the first CD (the only one with Don as a member) will be released by Mellow Records soon. Which is good because I'm guessing that one would have had less distribution than the subsequent Melting Euphoria CDs, given that they were all on Cleopatra.
DF: I was in a number of rock bands in the Bay area in the 80's. In the early 90's I was working with the same company as Kim and Paul from Thessalonians. I wasn't in Thessalonians yet, but I was in a couple bands with Anthony. One was called Red Gypsy Rain. And they have 2 Red Gypsy Rain pieces on the new re-release. At some point we lost our drummer. So we continued with a part-time drummer and even did some things with poetry. So it was totally different for a couple gigs, but we were on our last leg. So Anthony and I decided to start a new band. We put an ad out and got a response from two people - Mychael Merrill and Dan Miller. And we had a band called By Design, which was an odd little mixture of Hawkwind and even Genesis. We did a few gigs and then it kind of died. Anthony went to England for a little bit and then came back with his family, and at that point Mychael, him and I regrouped and started Melting Euphoria. We were together for almost a year and working towards releasing a CD. That first CD was called Through the Strands of Time. It was on Stratospheric Records, which for all intents and purposes was Anthony's label. Before it came out I ended up leaving the band, and about a month later the CD came out and they used it as a demo at Cleopatra and Cleopatra said they wanted to sign them, but that they wanted them to redo the songs. They replaced me with 3 people, and this ended up being the first CD for Cleopatra. They added a keyboardist, which was Luis, or Zero. And they added Dan who was in the By Design band. Probably the weirdest thing was reading a review of both CDs at the same time. It's all the same songs except for one, and I thought it was hilarious that the reviewer didn't understand that. They then got a gig opening for Hawkwind in San Francisco. I went to the gig and they had decided to give away that first CD. Give copies to everybody in the audience, which I thought was a great idea. So to tie this all back to Mellow… I had always felt that first CD would be a good re-release because a lot of people didn't know about it, or hadn't heard it. I guess there are certain elements of it that are different from the Melting Euphoria most people know. But it's the same rhythm section and it was the starting point. But over the years there's been about 3 or 4 labels that I thought would be appropriate to re-release it, and Mellow was one of the ones I gave it to and they said yes. It probably was at the same time I was shopping the new material for Spirits Burning and Quiet Celebration.
AI: So talking about Melting Euphoria is probably a good lead in to talking about Fireclan. Both Mychael and Luis were part of that with you.
DF: It would have been interesting if Melting Euphoria wasn't in limbo at that point. Partially because people were living in different parts of the US. This was probably a few months after the Strange Daze gig [1998]. They were in limbo and it wasn't clear whether they were going to regroup someday or make more CDs. So Mychael and Luis started jamming a bit, and I always wondered if that material could have ended up being a Melting Euphoria CD. But to me the Fireclan stuff is much different in the way Luis was playing keyboards. It's more sequence driven, but also with more melody. It wasn't just these little spacey sounds in the background. It just felt very different. I don't know what would have happened if Melting Euphoria was still together and done that material. What would happen when you add a heavy guitarist like Bob Clic. And heavy bass parts like Anthony. So at the point Mychael and Luis came to me… I was having them guest star left and right on Spirits Burning, and actually Mychael is on the Quiet Celebration CD. And I basically said I'd love to produce it and be a member of a band. And really I think the only caveats were I wanted it to be serious and try to become a live band. And the other thing was I said let me produce it, and I'll get your opinion, but really let me produce it and shape it and re-shape it. I think maybe the only other thing that happened was Mychael had ideas for different guests, and some of them I semi shot down, but I loved the idea of having a cello. And I had Daevid Allen over and I thought it would be really good to get his name on that CD, and he could do some nice gliss stuff.
AI: Did Fireclan ever do anything live?
DF: No. The great plan I had about 3 or 4 years ago, and I'm not sure how well I would have followed it through because I've already got so many projects going on… but I'd setup two bands to play live. One was Fireclan and the other one was Quiet Celebration. And things just happened in people's lives that made it impossible to get together and practice. And at this point I probably had less interest in playing live in general.
AI: Is there any other Fireclan material that wasn't released that you might do something with in the future?
DF: No.
AI: Just a one-shot?
DF: Yeah. Actually it was a blast to play bass again, because I originally was a bass player. It was a lot of fun.
AI: Getting back to the Melting Euphoria reissue, tell me about the two bonus track bands - Red Gypsy Rain and Myrth.
DF: Myrth is a band I know very little about. But at the time I was in Red Gypsy Rain, Mychael was in Myrth. They were more into folk and prog. There's a moment where it almost feels like it could be Spinal Tap. But it's also kind of quaint. I think it's actually a nice close to the CD. Red Gypsy Rain, on the other hand… I had run my course of bands in the 80's, and I guess the first couple years of the 90's. There was different versions of Spirits Burning in those days. There was lots of different styles. Bits of space, bits of prog, with bits of new wave and bits of punk. But it all ran its course. So I decided to take one more shot and I tried out for a band - I hadn't tried out for a band in 10 years - and it was this band with Anthony on bass, a guitarist and a drummer. So basically, Red Gypsy Rain at that point was kind of this weird mixture of Yes, Grateful Dead and little bits of Gong and Hawkwind. And it turns out they were really into space rock. I kind of influenced them a little bit, suggesting we do more of that, maybe do a song or two with vocals. So we practiced intensely and did a bunch of gigs. And it was around that same time that I got the offer to join Thessalonians. There were a lot of things going on at the same time. So Red Gypsy Rain had me and Anthony in it, and Myrth had Mychael.
AI: Those tracks round out the reissue very nicely.
DF: Yeah, I hope it makes it something really worthwhile. And it's got a nice little booklet and all that too.
AI: Let's talk about Spirits Burning. It started out as a live band. Tell me how this gathering of space rock musicians concept came together. These are light years beyond mere compilations.
DF: They're more like virtual bands, where with each piece there's a shifting of the lineup. I was really enthralled with the first few Eno albums, where he'd have members of Pink Fairies, Hawkwind, Roxy Music and King Crimson on the same piece. And I thought that's an odd get-together. It's people who usually go in different directions. And I thought what Eno was doing was really brilliant, bringing these different sounds and different characters and personas together. I think he was actually very successful with that. At the time that I came up with the idea, things were happening where I now had a home studio. I could record digitally, with the workstation I had I could bring things in either through DAT or cassette tapes if I had to or CDRs… there's just so many ways of communicating. And the internet also made it possible to email people and get in touch with people long distance to see if they would be interested in something like this. It's funny… it's not a band I listen to a lot, but the band that maybe influenced it at the moment of inception was Pigface. I had read about them and they were kind of a gathering of people who seemed to be into industrial and punk. I can't remember who the leader is, but it turns out that Larry Thrasher from Thessalonians had been a part of Pigface. But at some point I heard about them and it gave me the idea to have a gathering of space rock people. I tend to be more pluralistic in what I do musically. So it was very unlikely that I was going to gather people together and do a Hawkwind CD. As much as I've liked Hawkwind over the years, I'd rather gather all these influences but also hopefully take it somewhere new. When Musea picked up the first two CDs I liked that they were calling it new music. It's debatable as to what extent is it prog, to what extent is it space, to what extent is it occasionally Rock in Opposition. It's very debatable. I kind of like that it's debatable.
AI: I think it's all those things. I've listened to all 4 of them over the past couple weeks, and revisited the first 2, and really in a lot of ways it covers all that ground. So do you stitch all this together yourself? I read the credits and in some cases it seems like you're working with 3 or more sources sometimes.
DF: Here's an analogy. You know how when you're working on your web site… you can add text, you can add graphics, you can add audio, you have the ability to bring all that together to make a web page. When you're working in music, traditionally you would have to have all the instruments in one place, or at some point people visiting, and you record the whole thing to tape. And now you're doing it digitally. For instance, let's say somebody starts a piece. It could be me, it could be somebody else. And let's say there's 4 minutes of music, and every now and then it changes key. I can record that, put it on a CDR, send it to somebody in England or wherever. They do something on top of it, but in the sense that they also ideally have a multi-track recorder, so that they do their part separately. So that there's now two separate tracks. So they send me back their part. I usually ask them to send back their part separate… PLUS… their part with whatever other parts there were before. I never send people 3 or 4 parts. I'll do a 2-track of maybe like if there were 8 tracks at this point in time. So they know that this is how it sounds at this point in time. When they send it back to me, I import it back in digitally. But at that point I have all these choices. Basically I've got all these parts, do I want to keep it? Do I want to keep only what they did on the verses. Do I want to take something and process it and redo it. I don't do this that often but sometimes I'll take a little piece of something, like a drum, and make a new loop and a new part. I have the ability to do all that. So then the piece continues growing as there's more people involved. I'll do a mixdown of the parts and send that to somebody else, and wait until I get their thing back and send it to somebody else. Sometimes I work more parallel where there may be three people that have been invited, and they're all about to send me their parts, but they're all listening to something that was maybe thinner, and maybe only had just drums and keyboards. Now what's going to occur, as you might expect, is occasionally things don't meld together very well. So that's where it comes to me as the producer to try to make it work.
AI: I can imagine this has got to be a great networking tool as well.
DF: Yeah. Believe it or not, for as much as I've been doing with all this, and I wish I had more time, we have lots of tools available to us and I could be networking even more.
AI: One of the exciting things for me with the Spirits Burning CDs is that they're very much a who's who of contemporary space rock musicians. But you've also got some pioneers involved as well. One of the people you've collaborated with on a number of projects is Daevid Allen. You've done quite a bit with him.
DF: I'm surprised that it's worked as well as it has. I definitely wanted to get some bigger names to have one foot in the past and one foot in the present and another foot in the future. The thing about Daevid is he's not somebody who's just the past. He continues to do stuff - University of Errors, Acid Mother's Temple - he always seems to be reinventing himself. The other thing was that I had no idea that he was such a talented guitar player. I knew that he was the leader of Gong, that he was a lyricist and he could be entertaining on stage, but I just didn't have a clue that he was that good at guitar. And especially improvising. Some of these sessions I'd have him only for a weekend. And he'd come over and look at me and look at his pedals and he'd just go for it. And there's just some amazing things that are on the CDs that he's done.
AI: How did you ever get Bridget Wishart involved? I always thought she viewed her Hawkwind involvement as a brief flirtation with this kind of music. How did you hook up with her?
DF: The big key to all this is if you want something you have to try and make an attempt. There was an interview that was online and I got in touch with the person that did the interview, asking could they pass a message on that I'd be interested in having her guest star. I actually met her once. Hawkwind were playing a club in Haight-Ashbury. I'd taken off from work that day and I told my wife, let's go over to the Haight, you never know we might meet somebody from Hawkwind. So we were walking and I saw this women leaning on a wall and eating a kiwi. And she had a Hawkwind tour jacket. And I asked her if by chance she was the new female singer in Hawkwind. And she said yes. And we said hi, and goodbye and we walked onward. So when I did get in touch with her I mentioned that, though I'm sure she didn't remember. But again, it just goes back to if you don't try… I take this very seriously in terms of respecting people's privacy. So if I do get in touch with people and have their contact info I'm not spreading it around, and go to great lengths to make sure I don't over-email them.
AI: Well I think that will be an interesting one for Hawkwind fans. But that's on Alien Injection, the Black Widow release. When will that be ready?
DF: I was really pushing them to get it released this year. So we came to an agreement that it would be some time in the fall. What was unexpected was Mellow not releasing Found In Nature 2 years ago. So when it finally got released this year they were a little concerned that there would be too many Spirits Burning CDs in one year.
AI: So Black Widow wants to hold tight because Mellow just released one?
DF: When I called them I said one's all instrumental and one's all vocal. They're different enough. The other weird thing is probably a lot of people think the Mellow one was already released 2 years ago, because there's places on the web that say it came out in 2004.
AI: The date on the CD is 2004.
DF: Yeah, the artwork still shows that because that's when it was done.
AI: So Alien Injection really is the next CD as far as the recordings go.
DF: Yes. There are 2 pieces on Alien Injection that were done at the time of Found In Nature or even before. Usually there's pieces that aren't right for one CD but kind of get pushed out to another one.
AI: You've had Malcolm Mooney participate in Spirits Burning. He's another one of those whatever happened to him people.
DF: There's a CD he put out a couple years before that track popped up. And that track is from that CD. That's the only time I've done that to my knowledge, where the piece has appeared on 2 CDs.
AI: So the first 2 Spirits Burning CDs were on Musea/Gazul. And this year you've got 2 more on Mellow and Black Widow. Of all the people I communicate with in the space rock underground you seem to have had the most success with labels. How did these albums end up on a variety of labels?
DF: Musea releases CDs in two different ways. Either they pay for the manufacturing and then do all the distribution and marketing. Or you can pay to do the manufacturing and then they'll pick up the distribution and do the marketing. For the third CD they offered the distribution deal and I said no. Because it really doesn't do me much good to have all these CDs manufactured here and then mail them for hundreds of dollars to France. I could pay them to do the manufacturing, but that just seems like the old pay-to-play live thing. So it just seemed common sense that if there's someone out there that will release it, why not go that route. But to make that happen it has to be something that really has validity. And that does get into getting some good guest stars and having good music. And Mellow seems to really like what I do. And Black Widow, I know they really like Alien Injection and they're looking for me to do more.
AI: Let's talk about Weird Biscuit Teatime. How did that come about?
DF: I'm always working with things on the side. And there was some material I had done that could have maybe been the Spirits Burning CD after the 2 Gazul CDs. It's also potentially on the rhythmic/percussive side where I was going to take Spaceship Eyes. It just wasn't really clear. But I had a bunch of things I had started. Michael Clare heard it and said why don't you have Daevid and I add stuff to it, and let's make it a project that's just us. So they did that and it sounded great. And when Daevid heard the first mixes of it, his first comment was that we needed a drummer. I work with a guy named Trey Sabatelli who's played with Todd Rundgren, Jefferson Starship and The Tubes. So we added Trey. And then I did some mixes, and at that point I made the switch from my old Audicy workstation to Pro Tools. It gave me the ability to add more tracks. It gave me the ability to add more plug-in effects, like more delay and reverb and other things. I was mixing that CD on a laptop, believe it or not. And Daevid was in town. Daevid and Michael came over and they reviewed what I was doing. And Daevid wanted me to make it a little less dense. So it's probably a little less like Spaceship Eyes and Spirits Burning and perhaps a little bit more like - at least element wise - like University of Errors and maybe even Gong, although the music is clearly going in a different place. At that point I thought the CD was pretty much finished, and Daevid made about 3 or 4 suggestions that really served to enhance the CD, adding trumpet to the one piece, actually detuning the one piece a little bit, which was amazing how that worked out. And I think one piece Michael re-did a bass part into something totally different from what he'd done before. The other clear thing was, where with Spirits Burning, Daevid contributed as a guest star, and basically I could do what I wanted, this was a case of saying, ok here's a band, in the sense that he's willing to take a part in this. His name's on it, as part of this quartet. But to get to that we really had to achieve certain things. There had to be a certain quality. And I think that's fair.
AI: Is that a one-off or do you think something else will happen with that?
DF: We've already started the second one.
AI: You've also got a new Quiet Celebration album coming out on Mellow. I noticed the first Quiet Celebration was a Gazul/Noh Poetry co-release.
DF: It's the one time in my life I decided to do the distribution deal. What we did was instead of sending all the CDs to Gazul we made a deal with them to keep half of them. So that gave Noh Poetry the ability to sell them. On some level it was good because we had more on hand. But on the other hand I'm just not into distribution deals. Now the thing about that CD… of all the CDs I've ever been on, that one has kind of sprouted wings all over the place. Almost every piece has been used on TV. Things like Animal Planet, and Pamela Anderson Driven and the Davinci Code special…
AI: Well listening to the music I can easily imagine that.
DF: Yeah. It's not like it's long passages. Sometimes it's maybe 5 seconds, or 15-20 seconds. But it's really sprouted wings. So I'm hoping the second CD and some of the other instrumental things get the same success. I am trying to build upon that. The other thing about the new one… it's coming out on Mellow, so I think it has a little more exposure than being a co-release. Noh Poetry is really small. We don't have much distribution at all. But the other thing that happened was we lost one of our original members - Ashley Adams. And instead of replacing her with one person, what we did was we added a guest star on each piece. You get Rich Landar from King Black Acid on one piece. You get Daevid on another piece. We're also trying to be a little less dense than the first CD.
AI: Was the new Quiet Celebration recorded later than the first one? Recorded earlier? The first one was released in 2000.
DF: It was recorded later. About 3-4 years ago. The other thing was on the first one all the keyboard parts were done first, and all those songs were, in my mind, completed. And that probably would have been the second Spaceship Eyes CD. Then I got signed to Cleopatra. And first they asked for an ambient piece. And I took one of the pieces - it's called Sea of Steps - it popped up on the Ambient Time Travellers CD. And then they said try drum 'n bass, and I was headed towards electronica. And that was fine, but I did a totally different CD, a totally different direction. And then I took all those other pieces, except for the one that they had used on the compilation, and asked myself what am I going to do with this. There was a couple people I knew… John Purves, who is a multi-instrumentalist, playing flute, sax and other instruments. And the husband of somebody I worked with was Edward Huson, on tabla. And then Ashley was there as well. I think at that point, John for instance, didn't think anything was ever going to come of those sessions. Or even when the CD came out, anything of the CD. And then here it is getting airplay, and it's on TV shows, and he was surprised when I said we're going to do a second CD, and then when a label picked it up. And we're now planning on doing a cover for a future Mellow Records Santana tribute CD.
AI: About the collaboration with Stephen Palmer, Gothic Ships? You had sent me a preview of that music long ago.
DF: Yeah, I was trying to shop it around. The reality of that was probably on the one hand I didn't shop it around as much as I could have, and at some point I just wanted for people who were interested in hearing it to hear it. That's why Noh Poetry put it out. We only pressed 100 of them. But I really like it a lot. I always thought it was a really cool ambient CD.
AI: I've been getting a lot of enthusiastic emails from Roger Neville-Neil about the upcoming Action Man project. Anything you can tell me about that at this point?
DF: Yes. The concept is to take his Action Man character and some of what happens in the Action Man stories, and some of the musicians that he meets in the Action Man stories, and do a space rock take on film noir. What we need for that to happen is for me to go back to school and learn a little bit more about film noir. Because that's really Roger's neck of the woods and his expertise. So what's happened is over the last month he's sent me some books and videos. Actually my wife and I have started to go on Netflix and get some film noir stuff. We've seen a bunch of Bogey films and other things. And I think what I've discovered is while initially if I wouldn't have done that, I would have loosely done a rock thing that maybe had some lyrics that tied into this. But the more I think about it, I'd like to take the quality of the music that was used for some of those films and build off of those motifs, but in a ROCK way. The other thing is, we need to be darker. When we initially started it was like, are we going to do the tongue in cheek Lucky Leif & the Longships, or are we going to do the kind of storyline with talking like Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters. There were all kinds of possibilities. And while we're both influenced by that, it is important to me, artistically, to try to capture as many elements as we can. The other thing happening, in terms of who's involved, we're trying to get this combination of the worldwide space rock community and then some of the musicians from the Portland area.
AI: I think the possibilities are wide open with this. I'm always so bowled over by Roger's stories. I'm no literary expert, but these stories are definitely in a class all their own.
DF: We were talking about the tongue in cheek experience of the detective. It would be great to have Mike Moorcock do a voiceover. So again, that's another way of going. I started re-reading Roger's stories, and you get these moments where there's the Action Man persona and somebody else talking, like a bartender or something. And it hit me that maybe we could actually do some of the Robert Calvert type things where we have a little scene for a couple minutes, and have music in the background, almost like in a nightclub or something. I wondered what it would be like taking a remix of a Spaceship Eyes song and having it way in the back. And then it slides into another song that's maybe from a Spirits Burning CD. And then while that's going on have these two people talk. And then it opens up the possibility of who would do the Action Man character, who would do the bartender… there's people who are close by, like maybe I could get Paul Fox to do it. We'll see. But at this point it looks like we have Don Xaliman from Melodic Energy Commission doing a couple pieces. It looks like Tommy Grenas is starting a piece. There's a couple pieces that I had written in the 80's… Roger's ok if I do new versions of those. I actually need to read all his stories again. I really do believe in immersing myself in what he's done and understanding more about film noir. It can only help shape this and maybe make it more of an artistic thing.
AI: Well I'll be very excited to see how that pans out. So any other projects I missed that we should talk about?
DF: From the past, there was also the Where Stalks The Sandman compilation [see AI #17]. That had the only piece I've ever released under my own name. It's called "An Isolated Craft". See… I'm a poet at heart. But looking toward the future, I'm working toward a Spirits Burning CD that's potentially called "CrazyFluidTM & SpaceRIO". But it's basically got Daevid, as usual, and people from this R.I.O. band called Cartoon. So that's a little bit of a stranger space rock CD. But all the pieces are started. There's another Spirits Burning CD that I'm working on that has a bunch of Mushroom outtakes that Pat Thomas gave me. And my goal is to call that "Healthy Music in Large Doses". One of the pieces is no longer a part of that collection now because it ended up being used on Alien Injection. That's the piece with Brian Tawn. Let's see… Quiet Celebration, we'd like to do a third CD. I have a Spaceship Eyes thing I've been holding on to for 5 years that I'd like to get back to. It's all based on percussive sounds. So it would have no keyboards and no instruments. And the other thing is a project I have called Grindlestone. Grindlestone is a project I have with a friend of mine named Doug Erickson. He's a guitarist that was in a band called New Sun years ago. He's appeared on Spirits Burning and was on the last Spaceship Eyes CD. But he's friends with Peter Thelen at Expose, and years ago Spaceship Eyes did a couple gigs for Expose's Exposure music series. And the guy who setup the gig was Jeff Melton. Basically, Jeff and I met in the parking lot outside of Rasputin's music store. We got to talking and he was intrigued with some of my past, in terms of the Silent ambient stuff, and said he had a good friend who plays guitar and is a disciple of Fripp, and it might be interesting if the two of us got together and did a kind of Fripp and Eno type thing. So Doug and I got together. Finally after 7 or 8 years of starting pieces and throwing them out, we finally got to a point of throwing out stuff and starting new stuff, and continually not doing the Fripp/Eno idea that Jeff was probably thinking we would do, and we came up with this more of a dark ambient industrial CD. And I've just started in the last couple months to shop that around. It's got a real good sound. There's moments of Tangerine Dream. There is some moments of Fripp/Eno. But there's some stuff that starts getting more into Robert Rich and darker. I'm also hoping in another year or two to do a Where Stalks the Sandman II. That's one where I'd love to get some bigger names.
AI: You know Don, I'm just blown away by all the projects you have and all you manage to accomplish. And it's such a wide variety of music too.
DF: It does go back to if you want something, if you try to do it and see what happens, it's not a guarantee, but if you don't try…..