Unscripted. Uncomposed. Nonidiomatic. Improvised. Indescribable.

BY TONY STASIEK of THE BELLINGHAM HERALD Feb. 28, 2002

It was a cold Sunday night, the floor had been used as a dog urinal, and yet people sat while the Artie Smudges Trio played. Others simply disappeared. “I guess this is noise,” a straggler said. Correction. “Experimental orchestral smooth noise,” says Michael Griffen, the group’s 65-year-old violinist, etc., from his dining-room table the following weekend. He fills his sake glass with wine — Casara, the big jug. It’s a tradition he says: Saturdays mean band practice, and before band practice, economically feasible intoxicants. This afternoon is little different. Adam Griffen, Michael’s 41-year-old son and the band’s electronic manipulator, etc., couldn’t make the Seattle-to-Deming trip. He’s touring Spain in a few days. So it’s a rare instance in which Michael; 26-year-old clarinetist, etc., Danielle Morgan; and 22-year-old viola player, etc., Caroline Buchalter will practice a member short. That’s right. As an actual trio. But before they start jamming on the xylophone or feedback trombone, they discuss “Autonomous Blinking,” the band’s debut CD. It was recorded next door in the living room on a Saturday just like this. And just like today’s practice and all Artie Smudges Trio performances, it was unscripted. Uncomposed. Nonidiomatic. Improvised. Indescribable. “We never really had a plan beyond deciding who would play what instrument,” Michael says. “Every so often,” Danielle says, “someone would say: ‘Make this one strident.’” “Or sprightly.” “It had no effect on what we were playing.”

STOP MAKING SENSE
Michael’s living room has never been a living room. Instead of a television, there’s a tape deck. Grand piano? It’s been gutted and left for dead against a wall. Decor: Colorful yet busy — a wallpaper of concert posters, featuring names such as Behead the Prophet, Mukilteo Fairies and other acts Michael’s played with, played alongside or let practice in his home. There’s a drum set, too, that likely has never been a drum set. As Michael bangs away using a batch of tubed electrical-wire insulation in place of sticks, it sounds as if someone has fallen down the stairs. Hard. “The thing is, no matter what you’re playing,” he says, flailing, “it’s never going to sound like it makes sense.” It’s sorta the theory behind the Artie Smudges Trio. Michael’s got a degree in the music-theory thing from Pacific Lutheran University, after all, and has been playing improvisational music for, oh, 34 years. But Derek Bailey’s book “Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music” explains it better, he says. Page 98: The distinction between idiomatic and nonidiomatic improvisational music. “You can say OK, now I can play jazz, I got there,” Michael says. “But if you’re not playing in an idiom, you’re never going to get there. You’re never going to arrive. You’re never gonna be finished, which, you know … that’s good.” Wasn’t always that way. As a high-schooler in Bellingham, he played in a country band called The Ridge Runners, sponsored by the FFA. There also was a folk duo and a rock group before the improv bug bit. He painted, too, for 30 years to be exact. Income came from odd jobs, including teaching humanities at senior centers and picking grapes at Mount Baker Vineyards. And he saw no reason to move from his great-grandparents’ house near the Deming Logging Show grounds. So when friends of his four kids stopped by to practice with their bands, he joined them. With bands such as Behead the Prophet and Noggin under his belt, he saw a group called Keep Your Eyes Peeled evolve into the Artie Smudges Trio two years ago. And in every instance, he’s been the oldest guy in the group. By far. “My experience has been with musicians over the age of 30 — I’m gonna have to change that because my friends are getting older — (they’re) boring, musically,” he says. “It seems like starting about 10 years ago, there was a new generation of with a lot of the same values and goals as I have. There’s an empathy there. That’s why I’m comfortable: We see things similarly.”

SCRATCHY FUN SOUNDS
Two years, that was it. No more high school band. No more clarinet. Not for Danielle. By the time her family moved from Connecticut to Bellingham her senior year, she had traded her woodwind for a bass guitar. She and a bunch of friends found a practice space in a converted living room in Deming. They had a band band. It took four years, though, for her to play music with the guy who owned the space. It began with a Super-8 film festival in which participants played live scores for their films. Danielle had found an old trumpet in a basement. Then she found help. “Michael, Adam and Caroline and other people offered to back me up on electronics, viola and stuff,” says Danielle, member of the Super-8 Infitada film group. “After that we said, ‘Hey, let’s play music again some time.’” The Artie Smudges Trio was born. Danielle hadn’t picked up a non-rock instrument since high school. And the stuff her co-horts were playing on the Griffen-family noise-makers had nothing to do with Chuck Berry. With the trio, Michael started out on the violin, then progressed to the viola and trumpet. Cellos started appearing. A xylophone. Various electronics. All were passed amongst band members at practice. Soon, Danielle contributed her own: that old clarinet. “Its really amazing to pick up instrument you’ve played that long ago,” she says. “It’s still burned in your brain, like, you can see the notes.” And this time, the learning part was fun. “You realize how inspiring it is to play instruments you’re not actually trained on,” she says. “It’s great just picking up the cello and just starting to play these squeaky, scratchy, fun sounds. And as you start playing it more, you figure more of it out.”

BEHIND THE CURTAIN
Michael’s not sure who came up with the idea, him or Adam, who was trying to learn how to play the guitar. In light of lessons, they devised the “gestural method.” “It’s like air guitar, but you’re actually playing the instrument,” Michael says. “You make the right moves and worry about what sound you’re making later.”It’s a philosophy Adam’s carried with him since about age 8, Michael says, and it makes him the ideal collaborator. In addition to his job in Seattle’s Lighting Design Lab, Adam has played artists such as Christian Asplund, Wally Shoup and Nick Vroman, with whom he’s touring. With the Artie Smudges Trio he primarily twiddles knobs behind a mess of electronic devices. There’s an octave multiplier. A vocoder. Something called the boomerang, which samples other band members’ parts and loops them, plays them backward or changes their speed. Caroline likens him to a mad scientist — “Well, he reads ‘Scientific American’ all the time,” Michael says. Adam also makes things like the feedback trombone. It’s a trombone, alright. The hitch: It makes noise, but not when you blow through it. His explanation: “I was playing around with recorders, and I realized that with the microphone up to the end of it, it made noise depending on how your mouth was even if you weren’t ‘playing’ it. So I started playing it as a tuned tube until I found a paging horn at a thrift store. Then I attached a talkbox to it so that you could put the driver tube to your mouth. “I found that by fitting devices over the driver tube and playing the horn as you would normally with the driver tube, that you’d get feedback. The logical next step would be to find a trombone … ” “That’s how it is,” Danielle says. “Adam will be playing an instrument and explaining all the scientific reasons why it does what it does. Then one of us picks it up: ‘Ooh, ummmm … can I make it do that again? Cool.’”

EXPRESS YOURSELF
So wound up was the Artie Smudges Trio while playing Olympia’s defunct Arrowspace this past summer that band members ran around the block between sets, Danielle says. Rampant enthusiasm. Even after subsequent shows, they all had similar positive reactions. All but Caroline. “Everyone else is less critical about it,” she says. “I’m not afraid to say, ‘Y’know, when things don’t work out, you can hear it. It’s a lot noisier; not as much listening goes on. It sounds like an argument or something. “I feel like the one who has to be musical. Maybe it’s not meant to be a song, but you consciously make it a song.” Like Danielle, Caroline hung up her primary instrument, the viola, after high school in Edgewood, N.M. But she picked it up again to join the Western Washington University Symphony Orchestra her sophomore year. It felt good, she says. But the attitude didn’t stick. “Everyone there is so superclassical — ‘I want to be famous, I want to be in the Philadelphia Philharmonic.’ I’m like, ‘I’m an English major.’” Expression was the problem. “It’s just not as creative if it’s not something that’s coming from you,” she says. That’s why Caroline finds the Artie Smudges Trio satisfying, she says. And at the same time, frustrating. “I just want to sit down and compose a piece for us sometimes,” she says. “It seems like to get into that it’ll, take a little more motivation and time than what we usually do.” That may make it sound like a bad thing. So, so not the case. This band’s a long-term venture, says Caroline, who also plays in Bellingham’s Spooky Dance Band. And every time the Artie Smudges Trio gets together, she says, she learns a lot. “But it’s funny — we’ve never sat down and discussed what we do,” she says. “We just do it.” The only real notes coming from Michael’s living room this afternoon are swooping off Caroline’s cello in a synchopated fashion. Well, there may be other notes. Discerning them, though, isn’t easy. Michael’s running his bow across the violin as if to dice it, while Danielle has taken to using vertical strokes on her cello instead of the standard horizontal ones. Suddenly — truly without warning — the sound stops. Caroline’s the first to look up. “We never know when it’s over … ” “Yeah we do,” Danielle says. “Yeah, OK,” Caroline says. “I think when you play with people long enough, you know how to feel it out. And somehow, you end at the same time. “It’s really weird.”

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