Statik 3
A 2-song single of atmospheric indie-folk. Recorded on 4-track cassette.
Release date: May 1993
Credits: jh0st — 12-string acoustic guitar, fretless bass, soprano sax, voice
After years of ambient jazz and new wave, Statik 3 caught everyone off guard — including me. Geography explains it. These songs wouldn’t exist without the Appalachian Mountains that overlook Charlottesville, Virginia.
A printmaking student named K introduced me to her Thursday night people — a loose community gathering around bonfires in the Shenandoah mountains to play music in rounds. Guitars, fiddle, accordion, a PVC didgeridoo the size of a drainpipe. The melodies weren’t children’s rhymes but haunted howls channeling something between Native American ritual, Appalachian folk, and blues. I joined in with soprano sax and borrowed guitar, and learned that musical rounds can be a kind of meditational confession — private revelation inside a public sphere. Those sessions were never recorded — that would have broken the trust. But listen closely to Statik 3 and the atmosphere is there.
Statik 3 was once envisioned as a seven-song record. The five songs that never made it to tape eventually became d’ville — recorded thirty years later, still carrying the same Charlottesville ghosts
40 Days
Leadbelly sang about jumping in the river. Bill Evans’s last recordings embody what his brother’s suicide did to his playing. American music has always found ways into the subject that speech struggles to reach.
the garden grows beneath her bed today / the river flows beneath her head today / this empty dress she fills with leaves from outside / ’cause the sun won’t shine to keep her kindness alive
40 Days remains the most personal song in the archive. A close friend, S, was struggling with profound mental anguish — the dangerous intersection of depression and exceptional intelligence. When words felt useless, the only thing I could offer was to check in again in forty days. I set out to write something melancholy but hopeful. The subconscious had other plans.
i can see a way to be with you again / fall down the stair like only you would do / my head’s so cold my eyes are closed this time / and i’ll wait to hear your voice from heaven above
Stone’s Throw
six years have mocked my only visions / i will keep your wounded voices with me / instead of keeping your beliefs like a thousand lies
Before Hollywood bromances, there was the blood brother — a bond constructed together, one brick at a time, closer than family but without family’s mythology to explain when it breaks.
Stone’s Throw was written to be told from either side. The friendship it describes had reached the kind of mutual judgment only possible between people who know each other too well — intimate enough to know exactly where the wound goes deepest. Endings coagulate what was once fluid. It doesn’t matter who threw the first stone.
i can see a way to be with you again / fall down the stair like only you would do / my head’s so cold my eyes are closed this time / and i’ll wait to hear your voice from heaven above
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Sweet Blessing
A song sung to someone who can no longer hear it — grief, tenderness, and a broken violin with one string.
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d’ville
Five song-stories from Charlottesville, thirty years in the making — loss, longing, and flashes of joy. [2022]
