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I've been playing and recording my own music since the early 1980s. As a dedicated amateur you can't expect high quality recording or musicianship, but I've had a lot of fun over the years playing with friends in various groups. I tasted the bar scene a little bit and didn't like it, I'm much ha...

I've always tried to share out the music I've recorded at least with the folks who helped create it, but also with our small audience as they have been interested in having a copy. First this was on cassette tape with elaborate covers, then CDs with lightscribe etched art, then iTunes in the form...

2018 was still a couple years before the great plague and I was pining for Pennsic. I spent a couple weeks going over what was then the most recent Pennsic Pile, a fantastic resource of courtly dance melodies compiled for performance at that event and offered freely online for musicians to prac...

It was 2013. Tim wasn't playing out with us anymore and none of us were getting together to session very often either. I was worried that Bardic Circle was over (turns out it wasn't!) and I just wanted to get a bunch of the songs I'd been working on out to folks. I decided that I would no longe...

We started playing out at various venues, including AOH halls (Ancient Order of Hibernians, an Irish social organization), St Patty's Day and Half-way to St Patty's Day gigs, fundraisers, sessions, medieval events, and house parties. Tim created a website for us: bardiccircle.info which is no lo...

The TdB Bardic Circle Podcast has been discontinued. The podcast, which was running from 2006 through 2011 was updated infrequently with (usually poor) recordings of whatever we happened to be working on at the time. The podcast was listed in iTunes, which might be how you found out about it sin...

As more folks joined our merry troupe, practices and recordings got more complicated. It became more difficult just to rehearse and learn new tunes so recording naturally took a back seat.

While we were getting together now with our friends Sport and Cate Moran, Sean and Ailene Caviliere, and Ao...

Tim Cole and I were definitely on a roll musically in 2006 and it didn't stop at Beltaine. He had written more songs and we started planning for Pennsic. I hoped we might even be able to enter the music competition at the Chalkman if we could get Ned to come out as well. Nearer to home more fol...

On New Years Eve, 2005 I heard that my old friend Tim Cole had started writing songs and was performing them at medieval events. I soon arranged to get together with him to record some of his stuff. We started jamming sometime after Imbolc (early February) of the following year and worked up a fe...

In 1999 and 2000 I was getting together regularly with Ned and Rob McLaughlin on Rob's summer breaks and after a couple summers of doing mostly covers that Rob knew in my smelly basement (and then in a spare bedroom) I decided to put together a CD of some of the stuff we'd done together. We talke...

By 1998 it was rare that I got to spend much time with Todd and Ned any more. Shortly after Ralph and the Dry Heaves, Todd was permanently living in PA and Ned was in various places including Brooklyn, PA, and NJ. When we did get together most of the stuff I brought to the table was colored by...

I had gotten more interested in medieval re-enactment and with new friends came a broader range of musical influences. Medieval, Irish, and folk music melded with rock, metal, and punk - very strange bedfellows. Uruk Hai was never actually "released" in the very limited sense that any of my music...

I had a couple songs written when Todd asked if Ned and I would come down to help him on a project in the studio at college. He needed to record somebody (not himself) and it was a nice excuse to see Todd again, and also work up a couple tunes with Ned.

Ned had a fantastic piece he was calling N...

Before I met Todd he played bass in The Stock Boys with John and Eric. I went to a couple parties at Eric's house which were held down in his basement where his drums were set up - there were a lot of kids from Bellport and Brookhaven at these parties. I still have a couple of their tapes includin...

Todd Slater, Ned Berry and I did our first tape together under the name Ralph and the Dry Heaves, but a lot of the stuff we were doing at that time morphed into what we started to call Flying Mollusks material, an idea whose genesis I no longer recall other than I'd like to blame it on Ned. I u...

The Mollusks have become so popular that it is occasionally necessary for us to play under other names in order to book smaller venues in order to avoid the crush of adoring fans.

OK, that's bullshit, but this was our self titled Ralph and the Dry Heaves tape made in 1991.

The big "hit" on t...

This is the second of the 2 CD compilation I did in about 2000 for a bunch of the tunes I had recorded in 1990 / 1991. These tunes had a little harder edge. There are some backwards guitar tracks, distortion, feedback, a song built around a segment of Monty Python's Holy Grail skit, and I had use...

When I first got back from school I didn't have a job, we were in the middle of what I used to think of as a bad recession (till this one) and I was writing stuff constantly. I hadn't really learned how to sing out yet, I was still teaching myself how to play guitar, I didn't know how to record ha...

The year was 1989. Analog tape was state of the art home recording technology. For some reason recording an entire album of silly songs with voices sped up until we sounded like Chipmunks seemed like a good idea. Several songs became classics. A compilation CD entitled "All the Better to See Y...

What might be some of the very first recordings I ever made eventually ended up on a cheesy tape I made with a couple friends in 1984. We had just graduated from High School, I knew Erik from orchestra (he was a phenomenal 'cellist and unlike me was planning to pursue it in college) and Morgan was...