Biplane: The Project
Photo by Michael Broderick
Biplane features over 30+ artists from across the country working on Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) to create a single full-length LP. The album Biplane is a free-form conceptual art project tracing the fine glimmer of beauty amid profound grief— sketching the fragmentary landscape of death, dying, and love. In his 1933 speech on duende, Frederico Garcia Lorca stated, “The toreador who is bitten by the duende . . . makes us forget that he is constantly throwing his heart at the horns.” 1 The poetry, musical composition, and arrangement in Biplane are intentionally sparse, quiet, and at times angular, with a blend of broody pop melodies overlaid the detritus of old Ohio landscape of dust, coal, and rust: echoes of forgotten landscapes of coal and timber extraction of rural Appalachia and the tenuous beauty of post-industrial decay of Southwestern, Ohio. This album is not about loss but the tender art of losing and finding while contending with the long tendrils of death.
It is a heart throwing itself against the horns.
While working on the project, I often told my co-producer and old friend, Michael Elliott, that this project was, in no small way, “a meditation on death.” And that it is.
Over the last several years, I’ve experienced a tremendous amount of personal loss: the unexpected death of my father, the suicide of my dearest friend by gunshot, the divorce from my wife of 23 years, and my mother’s terminal diagnosis of cancer. These things haunt me still, and I needed a container for my grief. Part of the haste and urgency of completing this project was so that my mother could sit out back in her aluminum folding chair, watching bees flit about her zinnias as the late autumn sun sets, casting long shadows over the postage-stamp backyards in Dayton, Ohio and listen to the album.
“My boy,” she’d say with quiet assurance as she set her hands carefully in her lap—thumb resting in her palm like a spoon.
“My boy.”
We began this album in the summer of 2023 after my mother was diagnosed with terminal breast cancer, but I think, in all actuality, it started in January 1955. In December of 1954, my mother recalled it was the best Christmas ever—toys scattered like birdseed under a small tree and shimmer of colored lights. Shortly after Christmas, in early January of 1955, my grandmother, Vivian, was admitted into Miami Valley Hospital in Dayton, Ohio, where she died of ovarian cancer just before her 38th birthday. My mom and my aunt weren’t allowed to go see their mom in the hospital, so one cold January day, my granddad bundled them up in their Sunday finest and took them to the sidewalk just below Vivian’s hospital room. They stood there cold, bundled up in their wool overcoats, and waved to their mom. She waved back like a silhouette in the window. It was the last time they saw their mother alive. My mom was eight, and my aunt Marty was four. On the day of Vivian’s funeral, they had a wake in the house I grew up in. It was
Photo by Richard Gross
a bright, cold, sunny winter’s day, and the white curtains were pulled closed. Shards of soft, velvety yellow peeked through the lacey holes of the curtain, and one band of hot, bright light drove through a small crack between the front doors.
Vivian laid down the first notes.
My aunt stood quietly with her narrow cheeks squeezed tightly between the wooden door and the jamb, with the sun warming her face. Her white dress seemed to radiate. She looked like spring.
She was waiting for her mother to return.
In 1999, Nick Cave channeled his inner Lorca in a speech about death and the love song to the Atelierhaus der Akademie der Bildenden Kunste, Vienna. He mused, “Amidst the madness and the mayhem, it would seem I have been banging on one particular drum. I see that my artistic life has centered around an attempt to articulate the nature of an almost palpable sense of loss that has laid claim to my life.”2 This was not a message of darkness or some sort of somnolent gray, nor was it a message of unfettered hope. It was a mere observation: art is born of suffering. Or, to be more precise, art with soul is born of loss. “The Love Song is the light of God, deep down, blasting through our wounds.”3 This album, in large part, and my work of the last decade or more, has been a dogged effort to understand the meaning of loss and love—a feigned attempt at a trumpet blast.
— Michael Broderick (co-producer, Biplane)
Biplane: The Process
Video by Michael Broderick
We live in the land of Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs). These are a force mighty enough to topple beloved recording studios that reached their heyday in the 70s and 80s. Now we can do so much together without seeing each other or even speaking a word. For many reasons, this relatively new revolution is a good thing. We make music together that, in the past, would have been impossible without buying plane tickets or reels of analog by freight back and forth. Who wouldn’t want to spend a month together recording in a studio and hashing out something meaningful, great, and powerful? Something that you hope will transcend run-of-the-mill popular music. The odds are stacked against you, and a million factors loom in front of you as the engineer presses “record.” In the studio, you have only the time that you can pay for and only the musicians that you can pay for. And mostly, you only have the care from a professional that you can pay for. Once a person establishes that this professional approach
is not doable, they are left with a gift from technology, and a powerful one at that. While the audio console symbolizes the beauty and power of popular music throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, The DAWs is a machine that has been planted into the hands of thousands and thousands of musicians and enthusiasts who not only want to get their vision down but make something perfectly beautiful for themselves that can be shared as art with no obligation to exploit. Such is the case with a project created by Michael Broderick in which multiple DAWs from different cities were used by different musicians to create a dynamic canvas for his poetry. Make no mistake. This is not reinventing the wheel, but the real beauty and power in this project lies within the subject matter, meeting the players in the one place that they all used to share in common:
Photo by Michael Broderick
Ohio
This brings us back to the power of DAWs—the process is perhaps more important than the final product.
For example, track one, Biplane, was written by Michael Broderick and then given to Miles Down. Miles recorded his vocals and his acoustic guitar onto his DAWs and sent the result back to Michael. Michael Broderick became interested in adding accompaniment and assumed his role as a co-producer. Mike Elliott suggested that they move the piece to Mark Meisinger in Chicago for feedback and for possible additions to be made to the song. Mark was happy to oblige and added cello and strings to the track. The track was then sent back to Michael, who, while liking the result, wanted to further push the piece. Michael recorded his son, Wren Broderick, playing the bass with his iPhone.
Photo by Michael Broderick
He then sent the bass track to Mike Elliott, who added the bass track in his DAWs and then played it back for Michael. Liking the results, Michael recorded Wren playing keys, and then he recorded his ex-wife, Amy Broderick, playing glockenspiel. These tracks were all put into Mike Elliott’s DAWS for editing. After Mike Elliott corrected any small timing and performance issues, all of the music tracks were separately downloaded off of Mike Elliott’s DAWs and sent to Mark Meisinger for him to, once again, put the tracks on his, more powerful, DAWs, combining everyone’s contributions, including his own. At this point, Mark could now make a final mix. After Mark produced a final mix, this song (and the entire album) was sent to Zeb Dewer in Portland, Oregon, to be mastered to create a cohesive songscape. At this point, the album was sent back to Michael and Miles for final second-by-second soundscape edits. That is a somewhat simplified version of how this cyber-city-to-city collaboration occurred throughout the entire project. In the
example above, one iPhone and two DAWS were used in three different locations to create one piece. On other tracks, such as Before the Grey, as many as four DAWs and four iPhones were used in six different cities. For the most part, very few of the 30+ artists ever shared the same soil, let alone the same recording studio. In fact, of the 25 artists who laid down tracks for the album, nine artists used their iPhones for recording. This included all of the spoken word poetry and the three-layered harmony for track fourteen, “before the gray,” and The Weary Orchestra’s multi-layered harmony (featuring eight different artists) at the end of track five, “weariness of flight.” The mix of both lo-fi and hi-fi recordings created significant challenges for the composition, arrangement, recording, and mostly the mixing and mastering of the album into a single cohesive soundscape. In 2010, Oh Boy Records released a twelve-track, star-studded tribute album to the venerable John Prine—the album was a beautiful tribute but also distinctly a complication album. Biplane is not a tribute but a polyvocal and unified soundscape. Michael made it expressly clear from the beginning that the soundscape for Biplane would be a single cohesive sound similar to the somber vernaculars of The Dirty Three or Sparklehorse.
A single voice, a single soil.
In this seemingly cold method of art, intimacy is shared through negotiation and cooperation in chiseling out the piece until everyone involved has been mostly satisfied. Considering the endless options at the engineer’s hands, this is no easy feat. Consider Brian Eno’s concept of eliminating variables before even starting a project. For example, a person may decide that they will only record every vocal through a tin can and only use old a.m. radios as amplifiers. By setting parameters, you eliminate variables. Michael Broderick set variables for Biplane. One of the variables that he set was that he did not want a “big studio sound.” And it was a good thing since none of the participants involved owned a mic over 500 dollars.
The next variable was that Michael did not want a lot of synthesized sounds. He wanted the music to sound like the Ohio that he remembered. A lot of the contributors are bluegrass and folk players and had little problem creating sparse and natural sounds that ended up equating to a powerful loneliness. However, the lure of Bill Wagner from Columbus and Mark Meisinger from Chicago adds angular synthesized sounds to
Photo by Michael Broderick
the album that set off the spoken word pieces. But the parameter remained. Try to keep it sparse. Try to keep it quiet. The poetry of Michael Broderick is hardly sparse and hardly quiet. It is, as he put it, a “meditation on death,” and his writing on the subject hardly “whips the audience,” as Bob Dylan put it. It is precise and insightful writing that boldly fueled the contributors of Biplane.
The album is an unlikely, smoke-chugging vehicle.
There is no doubt that this is much more than popular music. And in saying that, I can think of nothing I like more than popular music. I live for it. But Biplane is not that. The album Biplane is many DAWs, many iPhones, many emails, and many old friends collaborating to prop up really good art that needs no favors asked.
— Michael Elliott (co-producer, Biplane)
Biplane: Co-performative Witnessing
I dreamed about killing you again last night
And it felt alright to me 1
“This place is magic,” she tells me, her raspy voice damaged by a vocal cord injury and smoking too many cigarettes. She points to her land, a valley in the confluence of several hills they call mountains on this side of the Appalachian chain. We met Pat at the bottom of
Photo by Michael Broderick
the hill while you were trying to set up the shot of the old gas station, taking video, capturing the ting…ting ting…ting…ting sound of the lanyard hitting the large metal flag pole. Sitting in the car, I scroll through photos, trying to find video of the old railroad tracks when Pat and her husband Bill pull up in their mid-2010s silver SUV. “Hey, what are y’all doing?” Pat shouts out the passenger window, curiosity, not animosity, lingering at the end of her sentence. Hanging out the window, her husband, Bill, slightly more suspicious, blows smoke from a distinctive extra-long cigarette and eyes us up and down. You explain the project, the album, the videos, the poetry, and she says, “Well, my grandaddy used to own this gas station; come see the rest of our land. You hop in the car and explain what is happening, and we follow them through the small town, up the hill, through their plowed cornfield, parking on the edge of their cattle field. We get out, plowed, dry grass crunches as we walk to the center of the field.
“Watch out for Groundhog holes,” says Pat, and I look to you, then at the earth. Performance and
ethnography are the scholarly ethics in which you and I engage with our lives. Like Madison, “I enter performance as a witness and adoer…Performance helps me to see…it orders the world and lets the world loose.” 2 With our hands at our temples, blocking the sun from our eyes, Bill pulls out his pack of cigarettes. The pack is decorated with a stereotypically masculine face colored red, adorned by a long ceremonial headdress—the letters CHEROKEE line the bottom of the bag. I ask him if I can bum a smoke, and Bill turns to me, my cupped hands blocking the wind from the tiny flame.
A small flick, flick, flicker, a flickering speck of
Light as my dad fumbled with his zippo to
Light a sparkler half damp from dew 3
The syncopation of the music with the spoken word and the pop melody of “dog days” dance through my head, and my cigarette catches fire. I inhale the slightly sweet and smoky taste of tobacco and nicotine and ask if you want a drag; you take a tiny puff and hand it back, all our smoke twisting with air and earth. Bill hands me two for the road, and I carefully tuck them behind my ears as he tells us assuredly, “Pat is damn-near clairvoyant; she can see the future,” I tell him I believe him, and we all look out at the hills. “There’s magic up here,”
Pat turns to me and whispers, “We like to show people this area. Today is your day to be up here. Two times I brought people up here was gonna kill themselves, and they came up here, felt the magic, and left with a different spirit in their hearts.” I pause, “Now, four,” I think, but I would never say it aloud to these strangers.
In the end
it can all go
so quickly
it can
like a front porch
confetti popper
or a 4th of July
firecracker 4
As institutionalized artists, performers, and ethnographers, it’s been a rough few years for both of us. Since then, with the passing of your father, your mother’s struggle with terminal breast cancer, the ending of both of our significant romantic relationships, my grandfather’s passing, and my uncle’s suicide, our loss has been exquisite. And the grief ensuing from such loss? Debilitating, interspersed with joy and periods of loneliness and despair. We may feel fine for months or years, and then, in still moments of dissociation, remember:
On Sundays like this,
I’d call my dad.
Or not.
Mostly, I wouldn’t
call. I would
sometimes.
I’d call. 5
Photo by Michael Broderick
Photo by Michael Broderick
When you’re not at home
mountains and mountains
between us 7
Your aesthetic-based and embodied approach to grieving is a challenge to all of us, performance and communication scholars, to not continually vest and reinvest in the dominant white, cis-het, patriarchal, colonial, formulaic text-based scholarship that denies the body a centralized place in our pursuits of knowledges and truths. Conquergood explains, “The textual paradigm is not a sensitive register for the nonverbal dimensions and embodied dynamics that constitute meaningful human interaction”(Beyond the Text, 48). 9 When we privilege the text, we lose the body as a site of knowing. In collaboration with over 30 people, Biplane is an entirely different type of scholarship that threads soundscape through sensorial snapshots of the grieving process. The music is an essential part of the performance, not as fluff or filler but as a necessary element of the overall experience of Biplane.
However, the Biplane is also a highly theoretical piece if you are willing to engage in theory through the sensorial registers of the body. As a nuanced, non-normative performance of the grieving process, Biplane isn’t linear; it isn’t always pleasant, but it allows us to find resonance with others via music and sound. Yet, most scholarship, even performance scholarship, tends to be presented and represented in similarly hegemonic ways over and over again. Other than the work of AD Carson 10, no other communication scholars have produced albums as academic work. Like binge-watching an entire season of your favorite show to experience the whole narrative as one piece of art that ebbs and flows, this is how Biplane should best be experienced. But as most of us have the attention spans of goldfish, listening in spurts of time is akin to the creation process and is represented throughout the album. So, listen in whatever way as the precise syntax of the spoken word lyrics is paced in complementary ways to the soundscape; as tension builds between the two, the emotionality of the performance heightens and does not always neatly resolve.
Coincidentally, I am writing a theoretical text while I listen to and experience Biplane. I chuckle as I get another text from you asking if “I’m done with this piece yet?” In the spirit of dialogic engagement, the text resists ‘‘closure’’ and offers comfort in the inconsistency and partiality of knowing.” 11 The wind rustles the canvas tarp of my gazebo, my dog whines at me to throw the frisbee, and I sip my tea while I read the lyrics and tap my foot to the ending harmonies and hum:
I don’t want
to do
the things I
must do
not
today, or
tomorrow, or
next week, today 12
On our way down the hill, you ask me, “Do you think our students have any idea that this is the kind of work they could do, that they don’t just have to sit at a desk with a computer, but that they could go out and live and create art?” “I don’t think so,” I reply, “but I hope they listen to the album so that they can see the possibilities. Like Soyini and Dwight, on that last late-night stroll in 2003, we are two friends just “Delving more fully and in greater detail into the praxis of co-performative witnessing and what it means to be radically engaged and committed, body-to-body, in the field.”13 Grief is not over; we will lose again, we will grieve again. But we will also continue to make something new together.
This is the place. The season of my return. This. Now. The long, hot summer hidden behind pulled window shades, wood smoke, and oil lamps. The rhythm of this summer. The rhythm of all my summers. The forgotten moments, the smallest of small pleasures, collapse in the dark sorrow of winter and loss. Of home. My home. 14
— Kathryn Hobson
Biplane: The Album Art
When Michael asked me to be part of this project, creating a painting as a visual piece in this multimedia pursuit, we began with the base prompt that the project would be called “Biplane.” Michael described it as “analogous to heart, and that biplane heart that exists in a modern digital world of pain and suffering. Ill-equipped, I guess.” In a digital world that has influenced our thoughts and feelings, creating new realities and flights of fancy.
What remains at the core of our being when the last rays of the flickering screen fade away and we find silence?”
I still believe there is hope for all generations in quieting the chatter, turning to nature, recognizing the power of our abilities, and learning and growing through our discoveries and actions in the real world.
For those of us old enough to remember the pre-digital era, we find ourselves caught between daily digital engagement and the world that existed before. We may have resisted, but inevitably became immersed in the digital era—sometimes gradually, sometimes all at once. Suddenly, time has passed, sometimes over decades, and we try to slow down and ask ourselves, “Who am I? What happened? Where am I going?” This presents a significant rift in the psyche but also an opportunity to reflect on the experiences and symbols that shaped us, to return to the simple equations that excited us and formed us as we grew.
As I reach middle age, I find myself letting go of many things, shedding the unnecessary and peripheral, and returning to many things—the minute-by-minute wonder of nature, the meaningful relationships, and the symbols and artifacts that resonated with me naturally rather than being fed to me.
We have lost our quiet and intimate relations with objects
The concept of a curio-cabinet type immediately came to mind as a way to portray a collection of things that inform Michael’s interests, past, personal treasures, and all the symbols that shape a sense of self-history for moving forward, including the biplane, which I believe is a powerful and visceral machine capable of navigating the airwaves with thunder and immediacy.
Original art by J. Michael Conrad, Photo by McLaren Reed
We had a dialogue about different symbols, artifacts, and ideas that could be included. The best curio cabinets were never a haphazard pile of oddities but rather a curation of objects with personal power and resonance that shed light on the owner’s psyche and informed the path of their life. Our conversation slowly revolved around what to include. It was never my place to interpret the meanings of what Michael chose, but rather to channel the weight, bearing, and mystique of the objects into acrylic paint on wood. The scale of the project was simply to make the objects as life-size as possible (the biplane is supposed to be a model biplane, by the way) because that is the resonance of the symbols, talismans, and objects we choose and take on over life-size. The black background was chosen to show that these pieces are truly integrated into the deep layers of our mythology; when we get quiet and remember, we can become illuminated by reflecting on those relics, whether solid or energetic, real or imagined (true imagination, not fantasy) that have empowered who we have become.
Everything is framed in gold.
— J. Michael Conrad (album art, Biplane)
The artists:
Michael Broderick — Producer/Artist
When I’m not collecting wild mushrooms in old, moss & lichen-covered cemeteries in the Shenandoah Valley, I am an Associate Professor of Arts-based Ethnoecology at James Madison University. My areas of interest include music, poetry, short fiction, creative non-fiction, photography, and lo-fi ambient film shorts. I am primarily interested in how we affectively and aesthetically register the various vibrant assemblages of the material, the human, and the more-than-human world in hybrid ecologies: the beautifully perverse intersection of decaying human architectures and vibrant natural systems. You can find some of my most recent work in Text and Performance Quarterly and Liminalities. Please feel free to reach out.
You can find me at:
broderml@jmu.edu
https://www.instagram.com/mlbjmu/
https://www.youtube.com/@biplane
Michael Elliot — Producer/Artist
I am a songwriter and a recording engineer from Athens, OH. I currently play music with The Standing 8s and The Speed Knobs. I have played in many bands but prefer recording myself and others in my home studio. Making Biplane with Michael Broderick and all of our friends has been an icing on the cake experience for me, and this project is an important reminder that music is for friends. And in our case, music is for friends made by friends.
Mark Meisinger — Mastering Engineer/Artist
Mark Meisinger is midwestern born raised on corn, potatoes, wild berries, whole milk, and well water. Mark plays electric basses, guitars, harmonica, stand-up, ukulele, banjo, upright piano, synthesizers, and electronics. He enjoys pondering the paths of migratory sea birds, like the majestic black cormorant, as she passes through the Great Lakes. He writes and records in his Uptown lab in Chicago as Dark Walter formed It’s a Wise Child, You Black Kettle, Tality, and has played with Snake Oil Technicians, Radio Collective, The Kennedy Administration, Potaskey Brothers, Scar Bar All Stars, and is always willing to collaborate, improvise and play music.
https://darkwalter.bandcamp.com/album/always-the-last-place-you-look
https://youblackkettle.bandcamp.com/music
https://music.apple.com/us/album/self-titled/1345785804
https://tality1.bandcamp.com/album/more-tality-and-more-bidity
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCq9r_3oFAkp-0ea3Ry_V1zw
https://soundcloud.com/mark-meisinger/chucks-berries-meet-mobys-dick
https://darkwalter.bandcamp.com/
Zeb Dewar — Mastering Engineer/Artist
Zeb Dewar lives in Portland, Oregon. He has no pets and no children. He does play a little guitar and is miraculously still interested in life, although life is getting expensive and hard to find. Dewar has made 6 records over the last 15 years, all incorporating different elements of folk, soul, blues and early rock n roll. He hails from Appalachia but now resides in Portland, Oregon. Dewar and his band are touring in support of their most recent release Everything Is Wrong, out now on Curly Cassettes. He will be accompanied by Emilee Booher on vocals & organ and Dan Galucki on drums.
“In his two decades of lyrical songwriting and sleeping in weird places, Zeb Dewar has collected the sincerity and minimalist honk of late porch music and driven it into a searching embrace of early electric basement sounds. For the love of a moment of silence, there is a whisper. For the love of rock and roll, there is a small amp on 10.”
Dewar has shared the stage with Michael Hurley, Samantha Crain, Wooden Indian Burial Ground, Nick Jaina and Donald Beaman.
Justin Gordon — Artist
www.justingordon.bandcamp.com
https://flic.kr/ps/Vco1N
https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCwDSHK4L8mwL_odONHA-AHw/videos
McLaren Reed — Web Designer
McLaren Reed designs with intention and curiosity. Her goals are to use her experience in audio journalism, graphic design and web interaction design to create iterative projects that serve as solutions for others.
Kathleen Broderick — Artist
I have always had an intimate relationship with death. My mother died of cancer when I was eight years old, I worked as a Hospice nurse for 16 years, trying to make sense of death and dying. I am presently diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer, and this makes my senses more in tune with the world. It makes the smallest thing come to my attention: a morning glory growing on a telephone pole, dry leaves crackling underfoot, and the sound of my cat purring on the couch next to me.
Michelle Huh — Artist
Michelle Huh-Mounts is a writer, artist, musician, and psychotherapist. She will soon launch her private practice, Sun Psychotherapy, through which she will treat individuals, couples, and polyamorous relationships. Michelle is currently working on an album with her husband, Edwin. She is also working on a collection of essays and a novel. She and her husband live in Pittsburgh, in the Borough of Aspinwall, which is as Mayberry as it sounds, with their son, Simon, and their dog, Chewstopher.
Josh Conrad — Artist
By night, J. Michael Conrad is a scribbler, a dabbler, and a doodler, an artist and musician, weaving a quilt from the threads of the arcane and the seemingly mundane. By day, he is an acupuncturist and massage therapist. He has an Appalachian heart but currently lives in the upper Midwest of Wisconsin.
Wren Broderick — Artist
I was born in Athens, Ohio, and now call Virginia home. I started acting at 12 years old with a local Shakespeare group and have performed in a wide variety of genres over the past five years. My true passion, however, is all things music. I play bass, guitar, keyboard, and piano. My musical tastes are varied, ranging from heavy metal like Iron Maiden & Black Sabbath to Travis-picking American Folk music, but I mostly find myself listening to jazz: bebop, cool jazz, modal jazz, and Japanese fusion.
Caitlin Kraus — Artist
Caitlin Kraus is an Athens, OH-based singer/songwriter and guitarist/pianist who plays solo, as a duo, and with her band. She has two full-length albums—Gone Beyond (2023) and What Rises (2020). Her music is melodic, lyrical, and falls within indie-folk and alternative rock genres. She is also a full-time mental health counselor and music therapist, and loves reading, making collages, spending time outside and with her two dogs.
Bill Wagner— Artist
Bill Wagner is a songwriter and music producer from Ohio. Now residing in Columbus, he lived in Athens from ‘90-‘97 and played in many bands. In Columbus, he played in The Guinea Worms with Will Foster from ‘98-‘02, releasing multiple albums, and started The Bygones, releasing “Circles” in ‘02 and “In Threes” in ‘07. A third album is slated for 2025.
Bill has been working with Will Foster to remix/remaster recordings from their time in Athens and will be releasing albums from Protozoa, Pimpy Accelerator, and Harold Figley Trio in 2025. Wagner is also working on his magnum opus, “Painsville,” with his current band, Reckless Ops.
Will Foster— Artist
Will Foster is a songwriter and music producer from Columbus, OH. He lived in Athens from ‘90-‘94 and played in Discoteen 66. Back in Columbus, he started The Guinea Worms which existed from ‘96-‘14, releasing a bunch of records. He has recorded several bands, including The Cheater Slicks, Mike Rep, and Reckless Ops. He is currently working with Bill Wagner archiving and producing many recordings, old and new.
Shannon Grogan — Artist
Athens, Ohio, is a beautiful place, and I love to call it home. It is a great community to engage in all kinds of different experiences as a maker, participant, listener, mover, and observer. I am lucky to play keys in a band, The Standing 8s, with Mike Elliott. We’ve shared the joy of making all kinds of music together for a long while.
Matt Box — Artist
Matthew is many things, but, mostly, he’s a bass player who’s had the pleasure of adding low-end to some of the greatest records you’ve never heard of. He works in a 109-year-old cinema in Athens, Ohio. In his free time, he writes haiku poetry and takes photos of the disappearing beauty around him. Always striving to elevate the mundane, he’s a self-described penniless patron of The Arts. You can find me on Instagram (@foxiest_boxiest) and the photography app Foto (@mattebox).
Jonathan Xifteris — Artist
Jonathan Xifteris is a self-taught occasional fiddle player who has been playing fiddle occasionally for over 25 years. He hails from a short line of family fiddlers. When not playing fiddle occasionally, he can be found pulling lumber out of dumpsters to add to his Amazing Lumber Collection. He definitely plans on becoming an embarrassing father when his child is a teenager.
Chris Biester— Artist
Chris Biester is arguably the best damn musician in Athens, Ohio. Chris hosts the weekly Wednesday Open Stage at Casa Cantina and melts all of our faces with the occasional Chickenpussy performance, besides working as an artist at Passion Works Studio in uptown Athens. And, of course, Biester was the former lead singer of the legendary Appalachian Death Ride.
Rosalie Broderick — Artist
I was born in Athens Ohio, moved to Staunton Virginia from ages 11-19, and am now back in Athens for college. I have loved making art since I was a little kid, and my favorite thing is playing and listening to music. You can find me smoking on a bench and listening to sad songs.
Michael McGovern — Artist
Michael McGovern. The McGovern Brothers formed on the Blue Eagle bench and the many open stages around Athens in the mid-late 90’s. They have strived to play and sing traditional bluegrass music from the Appalachian Mountain region. The band consists of PJ Gilmore on banjo, John McGovern on mandolin and fiddle, Mike McGovern on guitar and Bart Motz on bass.
John McGovern — Artist
John McGovern. The McGovern Brothers formed on the Blue Eagle bench and the many open stages around Athens in the mid-late 90’s. They have strived to play and sing traditional bluegrass music from the Appalachian Mountain region. The band consists of PJ Gilmore on banjo, John McGovern on mandolin and fiddle, Mike McGovern on guitar and Bart Motz on bass.
Celka Kovar — Artist
My name is Celka Kovar. I am currently a Public Affairs Specialist, and recently (2023) obtained my Master’s degree in Communication & Advocacy from James Madison University. I have a deep love for connecting with others, creating playlists/listening to music, and studying astrology.
PJ Gilmore — Artist
PJ Gilmore. The McGovern Brothers formed on the Blue Eagle bench and the many open stages around Athens in the mid-late 90’s. They have strived to play and sing traditional bluegrass music from the Appalachian Mountain region. The band consists of PJ Gilmore on banjo, John McGovern on mandolin and fiddle, Mike McGovern on guitar and Bart Motz on bass.
Erin Cameron — Artist
Erin found her voice and song in the hills and hollers of Athens County, Ohio, with the dearest of folks. Her love for Appalachia then took her to Asheville, North Carolina, where she lives with her family in the “Land of Sky”. While her guitar and song-writing notebooks have gotten dusty over the years, she is humbled to be a part of this project and reconnected with voices, musicians, and memories that will always hold a special place in her heart.
Kathryn Hobson — Artist
Dr. Hobson (they/she) is an Associate professor in the School of Communication Studies at JMU. I teach primarily in the Cultural Communication Concentration in the School of Communication at JMU, affiliated with AAAD, WGSS, and Gen Ed. My research focuses on critical intercultural communication, queer and feminist performance studies, and arts-based qualitative inquiry. I have authored and co-authored several articles, book chapters, digital pieces, and performances about intersectional identities, culture, and queer-femme-ininity.
Tim Peacock — Artist
Tim Peacock is the Stuart’s Opera House and Nelsonville Music Festival Concert Coordinator. Stuart’s Opera House produces the annual Nelsonville Music Festival, which Peacock founded in 2005. Tim is under-educated. He loves music, is an avid record collector, and enjoys being outside. He often dreams of retirement.
Amy Broderick — Artist
I hold a BFA in Photography from Ohio University. My imagery is inspired by the aesthetics of the natural world and the human condition and where the two intersect. Art can accurately convey the human experience, sometimes even more so than the experience itself. The image waits until you are ready to immerse yourself into the space it creates and permits you to visit repeatedly. For example, walking through a grove of cherry trees while a cool spring breeze showers the petals down around you is palpable, and seeing the literal image or reading its inspired prose can transport you immediately. Imagery allows us to share a feeling, joyful or tragic, dreadful or dripping with sensuality.
Matthew McElroy — Artist
Matthew McElroy is old and tired. A connoisseur of the forgotten and unwanted. When not working he can be found at home in Athens, county Ohio, working. Matthew plays fiddle for Rattletrap Stringband.
Bart Motz — Artist
Bart Motz. The McGovern Brothers formed on the Blue Eagle bench and the many open stages around Athens in the mid-late 90’s. They have strived to play and sing traditional bluegrass music from the Appalachian Mountain region. The band consists of PJ Gilmore on banjo, John McGovern on mandolin and fiddle, Mike McGovern on guitar and Bart Motz on bass.
Erika Larsen — Artist
Erika Larsen is a storyteller who is interested in human experience across cultures. Her work explores beliefs, rituals, states of consciousness, spirituality, connections to the natural world, ecological knowledge, and the processes of death and transformation.
Adam Remnant — Artist
Adam Remnant is a singer-songwriter / musician / recording artist in Athens, Ohio. His musical history includes fronting folk-rock band, Southeast Engine. He’s been producing music under his own name since the release of the 2016 EP When I Was a Boy, followed up by full-length LP S
Leslie Horner — Artist
Leslie Horner studied Forestry at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and is currently the Regional Associate for Southeast Ohio at Central State University Extension 1890 Grant Institution. She grew up in Springfield, Ohio, but now calls beautiful Southeast Ohio home. She was honored to sing harmony with Michelle Huh and Erin Cameron in honor of our dear departed friend, Jody.
To my dear friend Jody, who’s kicking it on the next bardo.
We’ll look for you in the late winter sky.
Biplane: The Process
2 Nick Cave, “The Secret Life of the Love Song” (lecture, the Atelierhaus der Akademie der Bildenden Kunste, Vienna, Austria, 1999)
3 Nick Cave, “The Secret Life of the Love Song” (lecture, the Atelierhaus der Akademie der Bildenden Kunste, Vienna, Austria, 1999)
Biplane: Co-performative Witnessing
1 Wilco, “Via Chicago,” written by Jeff Tweedy, track 9 on Summerteeth, released 1999, Reprise Records, compact disc.
2 Madison, D. Soyini. “Performing Theory/Embodied Writing.” Text and Performance Quarterly 19, no. 2 (2006): 107–124. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781452233079.n14.
3 Broderick, Michael, “Dog Days” Biplane
4 Broderick, Michael, “Sparkler
5 Broderick, Michael, “Sundays” Biplane
6 Hamera, Judith, Essay. In Cultural Struggles Performance, Ethnography, Praxis, edited by E. Patrick Johnson, 306. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2013.
7 Broderick, Michael, “mountains” Biplane
8 Madison, D. Soyini. “Co-Performative Witnessing.” Cultural Studies 21, no. 6 (November 2007): 826–31. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380701478174.
9 Conquergood, Dwight. ‘‘Beyond the Text: Toward a Performative Cultural Politics.’’ Dailey 25, 36.
10 Carson, A. D. “Owning My Masters: The Rhetorics of Rhymes & Revolutions Vol. 1-2.” Owning My Masters: The Rhetorics of Rhymes & Revolutions Vol. 1-2. Dissertation, University of Michigan Press, 2024.
11 Spry, Tami. “A ‘Performative-i’ Copresence: Embodying the Ethnographic Turn in Performance and the Performative Turn in Ethnography.” Text and Performance Quarterly 26, no. 4 (October 2006): 339–46. https://doi.org/10.1080/10462930600828790.
12 Broderick, Michael, weariness (harpy) Biplane
13 Madison, D. Soyini. “Co-Performative Witnessing.” Cultural Studies 21, no. 6 (November 2007): 826–31. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380701478174.
14 Broderick, Michael, (grey) Biplane