On Land Festival

"Barn Owl will suffer an immediate set-back by location alone. San Francisco is seen as a place were psychedelia music is still king. While that may be true, Barn Owl have transformed the mundane sounds of Bay Area folk into mind-bending acoustics.
Comparing the work of the San Fran group to that of local big shot Ben Chasny (Six Organs of Admittance, et. al.) would be doing a great disservice to Barn Owl. Chasny casts a large shadow, but Barn Owl's Evan Caminiti and Jon Porras are on the cusp of breaking through and creating their own immense shadow over the Golden Gate. The combination of organic musical elements and raw electronics create a scene out of an Ennio Morricone scored spaghetti western. Desolation, isolation, and the slow decline of civilization--just the way it should be."
--electronic voice pheonomenon

In 1998, Starving Weirdos began crafting a body of staggeringly beautiful, unsettling freeform soundscapes, unbeknownst to all but a tiny circle of friends and neighbors in their native Humboldt County, California. The duo's recorded works had not surfaced until very recently, in the form of extremely limited CD-Rs on such labels as Jyrk and Root Strata and on the group's own imprint. They have, without exception, met with resounding critical praise and intense curiosity from the experimental music community.

At the core of Starving Weirdos is the duo of Brian Pyle and Merrick McKinlay. The pair weave intricate tapestries of sound from strands of electroacoustic improvisation, ambient noise, free-folk, and musique concréte. The density of these works is matched only by their clarity of purpose and execution -- each piece brings into existence a distinct sound-world, rendered with a pointillistic attention to sonic detail that belies the duo's economy of means. The result is a profoundly disorienting music that thrives on the tension between artificiality and organicity, stillness and constant mutation.
Starving Weirdos' music sits uneasily beside that of their contemporaries in the free-drone/noise/improv underground. While the group undoubtedly has something in common with such outfits as Sunburned Hand of the Man or Double Leopards (the two groups with whom they are most often compared), SW's expansive, understated approach to improvisation and recording more closely resembles an amalgam of early AMM, Taj Mahal Travellers, Basil Kirchin, and Pauline Oliveros' deep listening experiments -- as filtered through the crisp night air of California's redwood forest."