“Trills, chirps, screams, barks, grunts, clucks, croaks, bellows, and hoots.”
Do you like gongs? How about contrabass? Well, you’re in luck: Talking Frog, the new album by Karen Stackpole and Bill Noertker released by Edgetone Records, features 40 minutes of gong and bass as recorded live to two-track at the SIMM Series in SF. Stackpole, a Paiste-endorsed gong artist, has explored drumming and percussion in the Bay Area for more than three decades, experimenting with rubber mallets, felt and yarn mallets, ball chains, bass and cello bows, kitchen utensils, and other small objects as cymbal and gong strikers. And bassist and composer Noertker has worked in Bay jazz and avant-garde since the late 1980s. Together on this album they inhabit the world of the “cosmic amphibian.” Ribbit.