Something different and quite cool

Occasional I-94 Bar Texan correspondent and blogger Ken Shimamoto dropped a few people a line over the weekend about an improv musical project called PFFFFFT! that he's part of. The observant will suspect he's corrupted the moniker from "PTOOF!", the name of a Deviants album. Read on:

Not to be _that annoying guy who toots his own horn via email_, but I've recently done a couple of experimental improv gigs under the rubric PFFFFT! and I'm pretty stoked with the results (particularly set 1, track 12, and the second set in its entirety, which are audible here.

PFFFFT! is Clay Stinnett on drums, Matt Hembree on bass, Tony Chapman on guitar/synth, and myself on guitar. Clay and Tony played together in the great improv band Ghostcar. Matt and I play together in Stoogeaphilia, and he's played bass in some of my very favorite Fort Worth bands: Bindle, Goodwin, and Pablo & the Hemphill 7 (he still does in a couple of those, in fact). Tony and I have played together in "Lee & Carl's Jam" at the Wreck Room (R.I.P.). I don't believe that Matt was acquainted with Clay and Tony before the first PFFFFT! show.

Last fall I played an improv gig with Clay and we vowed to do another "soon," but nothing ever eventuated. Three weeks ago, I was eating a chicken fried steak at Fred's Cafe when Clay walked in. We got to talking, I booked a gig at the Chat Room on Magnolia Street, and we played our first show a week later -- two sets totalling about two and a half hours' worth of music. All of the music was created spontaneously on the spot, without any advance preparation (except for reading a Myspace post about improvisation from ex-Ghostcar trumpeter-in-exile Karl Poetschke).