David Westling born 1954 Chicago IL. In 1978 I took the plunge into serious electronic music creation by buying a small Emu systems modular. By 1983 I had moved on to an ARP 2600 and a more developed sense of what it was that I wanted to accomplish: still under the spell of Orwell's 1984, which I had read while in high school, I explored in musical terms some of the darker implications of the man-machine symbiosis then becoming a widespread concern. This was the idea behind my work "Exoline Elga" (1984). For the next few years I concentrated on visual art and didn't return to music until the early nineties. In 1993 I had three works appear on a compilation put out by Yucca Tree Records in Switzerland, "Point of Yucca Volume 1." In this same year I had two more compositions released by Pointless Records operating out of Kent, Ohio. The next six or seven years were devoted to further expanding my forays into the outer reaches of sound, utilizing an increasingly absurdist approach influenced by Dada and Surrealism. I began my latest round of sonic exploration in 2005 with the acquisition of a Doepfer-based modular setup. Since then, I have been increasingly preoccupied with questions of time and cadence and what one might call the Metaphysics of Wonder and Surprise. I am influenced not so much by the impenetrable theories and sonic efforts of Stockhausen as by Varèse's early "Poéme Electronique" and the work coming out of the GRM (Group Recherche Musicale de France) in the 1980s.

"Bum Crab Hatband", while not rejecting outright such genres as ambient and "space music", is predicated on the idea that the listener would benefit by a more challenging approach. I am preoccupied with time, and time as expressed in music. The shaman wishes in his attempt at connection with the divine to utilize sound to induce trance and thereby stop time. Other "sound workers" use rhythm to evoke certain types of motion, the galloping of horses, twirling ballerinas, or the violence of storms. But this connection to a naturalist perspective is not inevitable. At this point in time such devices serve to maintain our atavistic connection with the past, a past which cries out to be discredited. It is the world within one's own mind which, for us in the early twenty-first century, takes on more and more the evanescent qualities of the Real. Consequently, the external laws of nature as exemplified by Newtonian physics are no longer applicable This shift is of course mirrored in the newer theories of physics where at the subatomic level Newtonian physics is seen to be invalid. At any rate I believe there are profound new worlds to discover within us which might be accessed by such methods as I employ here.

This is an artist-made CDR in a full-sized jewel case.