Music Bio
I started playing the ‘Flutaphone’ in school when I was about 12 years old. Flutaphone led to clarinet, then bass clarinet on the road to alto and tenor sax. In highschool I moved from orchestra to jazz stage band, and then my school decided to pull me out of music altogether due to some mix-up with ‘credits’ (whetever the fuck that means).
It was about this same time that I discovered LSD, the Grateful Dead, girls and the acoustic guitar. I taught myself a handful of chords from a Grateful Dead songbook, miraculously graduated from Highschool (Why?), and I was off and running (to San Francisco, of course).
Over the next decade I traveled the country and picked up hand-drums, bass, mandolin, banjo, flute and anything else I could get my hands on, writing, recording, and forming such un-notable bands as: Greg Ely, Fez, Blue Grewness, Almost Moosic, Dunhill Time Card, Dingo’s Comb, Stocek, The Casco Bay Boys, The Distance and Corporate Cult…(e-mail me if I forgot any).
I released several stereo cassette compilations of my work over the years, and then, with the increased availability of digital recording, I remastered chunks of old analog works into my first real CD, Patience, in Arizona, 2004, followed by the recording of The Distance in Maine, 2005. Whatever is another analog remaster of old work too weird to go anyplace else. The rough sketch versions of some of the songs that appear on the Corporate Cult, Next album were released in Dec, 2006 as a cd entitled Rough Traks, followed by Corporate Cult’s debut album which is now available on CD Baby and thru most major mp3 distributors such as itunes, amazon, Napster, etc. We are currently at work on 2 new projects: #1 is a kid’s album featuring lots of Woody Guthrie-type work, and #2 is a new album that will encompass the new direction of our work, bluesy, historical, aggressive and fun. With any luck we’ll be performing the new material in the Portland area within a year.
I created IBorrowedYourStuff Productions in 2005 on the basis that, aside from my digital 4-trak recorder, any real equipment I’d ever used up to that point had been loaned or given to me, including the old dinosaur HP Pavilion computer that I used up until 2006 for audio and video post-production. (Thanks, Matt!). IBorrowedYourStuff became ‘Whispering Ham productions’ in 2007 as I finally got a grip on the know-how and hardware to take it all to the next level.
The birth of my son and the donation of the first computer gave rise to the creation of the Ihatethat short film series, which, originally distributed as e-mail attachments, grew in popularity and spurned the donation of the website you now find yourself visiting. (thanks Jason!)
As of October of ‘07, I have begun studying digital audio mastering and, realizing that this is a lifelong learning process, have begun to implement some of the best processing to date under our new name and location.
The future is now.
Many thanks to everyone who has made it possible through the years, many of whom continue to do so.
-GZ
“The present-day composer refuses to die!”