Nonhorse

This is the project name for when I do live tape manipulation collage. Its existence as a “band” is specious, since its what I call myself. It is me “doing what I do” so calling it by a totem name is a pure conceptual abstraction that I have come to by a particular life alchemy route. Really. You might think im just screwing with you here, but my inner world comes out this way, and thus it can be referred to as a healthy normal, necessary thing. Sometimes I play as “G. Lucas Crane vs. Nonhorse” because sometimes I feel like an entity called Nonhorse, and sometimes Nonhorse is a evil horrible thing that I want to FIGHT by ripping up tapes in front of people, and sometimes I’m just myself playing my instrument. Running a sequence. Jamming. Working out an idea. Naming something helps you, and subsequently others, organize it. Sometimes I feel like im covered in a thin film of slime, just from communicating.
The natural ridiculousness of naming your project after some seemingly arbitrary word emblem spirit comes out when the project is just a single person playing something pretty straightforward. Abstract totems are good for naming complicated social-artistic projects that would be hard to define quickly, but its weird when you watch someone play solo acoustic guitar and they call themselves “The Myst in the Mountains”, or some shit. Does a name attempt to explain something? Merely lend a context to be divested once the true experience begins? I’m not sure, so I came to Nonhorse in the most organic way possible: a horrible dream. Since then, its become a symbol for the horrible slide towards confusion that the world demands by its constant innovation. This is obviously something that bothers me in a secret deep way, but on the surface I hope that it might be interesting or fun to watch my pit of bothered-ness. In this way, I have represented my solo sound collage work to be a “battle” or “fight”, which I think nicely represents the internal aspect of “meaning something” by “doing something else”.
Pieces tend to be grouped around themes that can be explored by manipulating found sound on cassette. The cassette provides a physical connection to the samples and to the concept surrounding their collection. Also, since each sample on cassette represents a point in time, the finished collage represents a massive collapsed swath of thematically related moments. Memory folds in on itself, fractures, and repeats. I deal with these issues in various places around this site, but the inclusion here, is about my band, Nonhorse. So i'll just say "it’s the project where I play music in the manner I have discovered."