THE SKATERS

The Skaters are California’s Spencer Clark and James Ferraro. Best described as the moon-chantings of plains indians who found accidental gateways to other dimensions in rotted old trees filled with bioluminescent bacteria. Over the past years, since meeting at an all-day improvisational noise jam when they both called San Diego home, Ferraro and Clark have developed, as you can plainly read, an intuitive, radically abstruse language when talking about their music and visual art, informed, in parts, by mysticism and surrealism, in which subjective states of mind and the objective world are intentionally confused to the extent that both fuse into a single, undivided whole. The end result is not what you would expect — i.e., a pretentious, painfully dry avant-garde free-noise. Quite the opposite, it’s a totally out there, vocal-dominated psychedelia, based, structurally speaking, on the open-ended drone heard in industrial music, minimalism, experimental electronics, folk, world music, and free jazz. And, like the best free jazz — the early, fiery stuff: Trane, Ayler, Sanders — the Skaters’ noise-drenched cosmic soul is driven by their need to, in the words of Ferraro, “grasp something that is beyond what you can verbalize.” As of August 2009, there are over 60 solo works from Ferraro under aliases like The Wooden Cupboard, 8pashupatinath, Teotihuacan, Acid Eagle, Newage Panther Mistique, Dreams, Pan als Allgott Saturnia, 1977, Pan Dolphinic Dawn, Composition of the Sensibilities of Melted Knowledge, Snake Figures Fan, Sky and Mirrorbalm in Preparation for Deja Vu, Lamborghini Crystal, Arecaceae, Pacific Rat Temple Band, Nirvana, Splash, Liquid Metal, Edward Flex, 90210, K2, Silicon Oasis, Symbio-Dome, D.M.T., and recently a steady stream of releases under his own name. Spencer continues to explore three main alternate personas as Vodka Soap, Monopoly Child / Monopoly Child Star Searchers, and Black Joker.