Kilo

"Hitting the Bottom" by Joe Student, Philly Edge Vol 1 issue 9- 11/23/05

    Despite donning wacky maritime fashions and playing what the band describes as "sloppy" rock and roll, area band Sinking Ship takes its mission more seriously than it might appear; it wants to entertain the audience.

    The four local musicians who comprise this sonic crew, Captain Kram Henasey, Noj Thompson, Mit Conley, and Nosaj Fraticelli (hint: read those first names backwards), state they "borrow subtleties and blatanties from the classiest of classic classy bands of yesterday, while striving to push forward in creating the crap of tomorrow."

    Hopefully the band isn't referring to its most recent release "The Bottom" as the aforementioned crap. The eight song CD, which was recorded at The Bilge in Lambertville, NJ, offers rock romps, most of which will be played at the band's gigs scheduled for Thanksgiving week.  

    When contacted for this interview, Mit let us know that Noj and Captain Kram were on a mission in Costa Rica and though unavailable for comment on this story, both would make the local shows this week.  



Have you heard from Noj and Captain Kram? I know Costa Rica is beautiful at this time of the year.

 It is beautiful... Because it's free. And that's what the good Captain and Noj are doing down there: Keeping the beautiful places free. So no I haven't heard from them.  We've been maintaining radio silence in order to not damage the mission. 
 
What's the back story of Sinking Ship? How did you guys get together?

We all come from parts unknown including Southampton, PA, Yardley and Levittown, PA and Titusville, NJ.  But the good Lord (and probably the bad Lord too) brought us together one fateful weekend during a bad snow storm at "the Bilge" in Lambertville, NJ.  A few bad decisions later and here we are.

 
Your press photo features you guys on the beach, is it a tribute to "Lost,"  "Gilligan's Island" or "The Poseidon Adventure?"

It is not a tribute to some cheese dick TV show. How dare you try to re-conceptualize our already highly conceptual concept!  What was captured in that picture was an honest moment between four men.  Four men who just plummeted a finely crafted Ship straight to the Bottom.  A Ship that we love! You see the "Ship" is a metaphor for our music- our vibe if you will- and the "Bottom" is were we like to take each member of the audience and each show.  We drive that "Ship" straight down not for love or glory my friend, but for freedom (and we're trying to get laid)
 
You've got shows coming up in Philly and the 'burbs this week, do suburban audiences react differently to your music than city crowds?

Certain audiences do react differently to our shows, but I don't think it is a matter of geography (i.e. Suburban or Urban). We try to make each show sloppy in its own unique way.  I think most crowds love our level of suck and that's what we are going for so it is a real communal exchange of energy. The sucky energy from the band being fed from the crappy energy of the audience multiplying the drunken slop the band is serving up then being half digested and regurgitated back at the band from the spurting spectators all coming to a giant orgasmic explosion of craptactularity!
 
Have you ever played a room/club, or for a crowd that really sucked?
No.  It's really quite amazing.  We have never ever played a room with a small crowd, a crowd that sucked or was inattentive, or didn't like us.  Our a gig were we were treated like shit, didn't get paid, got our time slot chopped in half, our nobody bought a CD. We've never had stuff thrown at us. Never drove two or three hours to play for the bartenders in an empty room.  I really don't see what all the big fuss about the "music industry" is.  This has got to be the easiest business out there!
 
Do you play only Sinking Ship originals, or do you mix in cover songs as well?
Ya, we dabble. We dabble. 
 
Whose idea were your costumes?
Well that's one of the many bad decisions we've made I talked about earlier.  But we think in order for the concept to work we have to make fun of ourselves as much as possible.  So the Crew decided to costume up every show.
 
During your live show, do your costumes ever get in the way of your musicianship?

Nothing gets in the way of our musicianship, nothing!  Except maybe alcohol, our lack of musicianship and our costumes.
 
In a gang fight of costumed bands, who wins Sinking Ship, KISS, the Village People or Slipknot?

First of all music is not a competition. Musicians and bands should be helping each other, not looking at each other as the enemy. The fact that Bands enter stupid contests like "battle of the bands" is quite honestly upsetting. (although if a "battle" offered us a slot we would probably take it, but that's not the point)
    The point is Music is not a sport and we are a band for the people. We have no time trying to prove who's manlier, Sinking Ship or the Village People? We are lovers of all types of music, all types of bands and all types of ladies. Amen

    But to answer your question I think GWAR would probably win that battle. 
 

Where can fans get your new CD? Were you able to make your live material translate in the studio?
Well I think that's something each listener is going to have to decide for herself. Which she can do at www.sinkingship.net or she can buy the cd directly at www.cdbaby.com/sinkingship.
    But just on a personal note, I don't think that modern homo sapiens have been successful inventing a means of capturing what we do live yet. But we do have a great crew of honest working kids working on it in the "research cabin" of the Ship. 

  
 
A few of these shows are right after Thanksgiving, what are your holiday plans? Are you worried about the effects of tryptophan (from Thanksgiving turkey) on clubgoers?

Worried? We can't wait!  In fact we've been injecting pure tryptophan into our ear lobes all week!  Right on!  



www.phillyedge.com

This article by Kevin L. Carter was prepared for the July 19, 2006 issue of U.S. 1 Newspaper. All rights reserved.

Music with the Unpredictability of the Ocean

    Tim Conley comes by the name "Ocean Exposition" for his band legitimately. The guitarist, originally from Yardley and still a resident, spent most of his summers growing up "down the shore" on a boat owned by his parents. "It has two meanings," he says. "The first meaning comes from my personal situation; my parents were avid boaters, and they were teachers, so they had the whole summer off. As I remember it, we would often spend the whole summer on a boat in Bricktown, close to Point Pleasant."

    The family, according to Conley, would travel up and down the East Coast, making stops in ports all along the way. They lived on the boat, and sometimes they experienced choppy seas and other seaborne calamities that made things a bit difficult. "There was a lot of unpredictability about being on the sea," Conley says. "We had a lot of experience with boats breaking down, and being caught in bad weather. Those experiences have also been a big influence on my work."
The second meaning of Ocean Exposition likens the band's unpredictability in mood, ambiance, chord structure, and time changes to the unpredictability of the ocean. An excerpt from Conley's Myspace page reads as follows:

    "The `Ocean' represents life, evolution and motion. The unpredictability of the Ocean in Time and Space. The `Exposition' is the gathering and display of these parts into one big piece of music. Most of the compositions are connected in some way, either borrowing melodies, grooves, or progressions from one another or simply by connecting one song or improvisation into the next."

    Conley elaborates. "When I was writing these songs (on the band's eponymous 2004 debut album), that was on my mind. The track "Laughing Faces" was the name of the boat I grew up on, and I started writing a lot of the songs in odd time, with the signatures jumping from 5/4 to 4/4 to 6/8. It doesn't stay in one spot. It's like the ocean, the waves, which are always unpredictable. They are parallel to each other, but moving independently. Each one is completely different. It just seemed right to put (the music) into that context.

    Ocean Exposition brings its mix of jazz, world, and Latin groove to two upcoming shows. The first (with keyboardist Joe Ashler added) is Saturday, July 20, at Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton, and the second is at Small World Coffee in Princeton on Saturday, August 5.

    Most of the compositions the band plays are Conley's. He establishes the framework, but then the rest of Ocean Exposition quickly takes them over. The band features Conley on guitars, Jon Thompson on saxophones, Jason Fraticelli on bass, and Joe Falcey on drums. All of the band members started out as rockers but now the band has taken off into a jazz-fusion-jam band direction. "For an improvisational band or a jazz band it is all about what that band may sound like on that day. The next day we may play the song completely differently. And we are also playing every song completely differently than the way we played them two years ago. We are structuring them differently and trying to grow together."

    Conley's parents, John and Kathy, started out as public school teachers but branched into nonprofit work. Conley's father worked for Mercer Street Friends Center and the Village Charter School, and Conley's mother worked as a program director for Camp Fire (formerly Camp Fire Girls). His parents are now retired and still sail their boats whenever they can.

    Band members Conley and Fraticelli grew up near each other and went to school together as youth, both graduating from Pennsbury High in 1996. But they didn't often play music together. "We both went to Bucks County Community College for music, and that's when we started hanging out and playing," says Conley.

    Fraticelli later moved to the New School in New York while Conley stayed local. He began working with a band called Electric Jellyfish, which gigged often at Joe's Mill Hill Tavern in Trenton. That is where he met Ewing native Falcey and saxophonist Thompson. "There was definitely a very cool scene down there for a few years."

    The musicians began moving away from rock and toward jazz. Fraticelli and Conley got turned on to jazz while in school. "At first I was not really responsive to it; it wasn't really my choice. But they crammed it into my head, and I started to develop a love for it. It is a really amazing art form. For us as a band to play as improvising musicians is really a no-brainer."

    When asked about his main musical influences, Conley gets a bit uncomfortable, only because he has so many, and because so many of them subtlely or even unconsciously influence his music. "That's a hard question. It's impossible to even listen to everyone," he says. He cites musicians such as Bill Frisell, Trey Anastasio, Marc Ribot, Jon Scofield, John McLaughlin, and Frank Zappa and the guitarists (Thom Yorke, Ed O'Brien and Jonny Greenwood) from Radiohead as big influences.

    Although Conley does not mention Brian Blade as an influence, he shares a penchant for the airy, dreamy ambiance with the Louisiana-born drummer. Blade has recorded two arresting albums as a leader and has gigged with saxophonists and guitarists and other musicians as diverse as Wayne Shorter, Joshua Redman, Daniel Lanois, Rick Margitza, Norah Jones, and Joni Mitchell.

    Conley says the band recorded its 2004 disc in two days. "We had been gigging for a year and working on a lot of songs, and just spent time working them out. When we went in the studio, we literally played them just one or two times, and most of the tracks are first takes. The record is pretty much close to a live sound."

    In this regard, Conley's music evokes the best aspects of the ECM Records oeuvre, a German label that also specializes, at least sometimes, in adventurous but accessible, quickly recorded genre-bending acoustic jazz fusion music.

    Every member of Ocean Exposition is involved with other projects, so Conley says that this group likes to concentrate lots of shows into a month or two and then take a month or two off. "We want to get our fan base to grow - and I know that is not always that easy to do. We don't have any vocals, and each time we play the songs they are different," he says. "But people come out and listen to the shows, record them, and put them online. That helps a lot. They can download the shows and hear how the songs are changing with time. People are coming out more to see us now."

Ocean Exposition, Thursday, July 20, 7:30 p.m., Grounds for Sculpture, 18 Fairgrounds Road, Hamilton, 609-689-1089, www.groundsforsculpture.org; and Saturday, August 5, 8:30 p.m., Small World Coffee, 14 Witherspoon Street. 609-924-4377.

Guitarist Tim Conley's funky standards and improvisations make for stand-out shows
Posted: 2005-11-11
By Mark Sabbatini     
AllAboutJazz.com

Funky classics. Innovative improvisations. Gritty guitars. No cover charge.
This is why I keep wading through so much muck on the Internet.

Guitarist Tim Conley joins the tiny percentage of jazz artists with a significant amount of quality work available free of charge online with several live performances between July and October of 2005 posted at the Internet Archive.
A July 29 performance features eight songs (and three tuning tracks that can be ignored) in MP3 format totaling about 80 minutes. Five standards serve as bookends for three improvised tunes in the middle of the show. An Oct. 7 show opens with two improvisations before settling into mostly familiar songs by Joe Henderson, Charles Mingus, Henry Mancini, David Bowie and Oscar Hammerstein.
The impressions aren't always an instant hit. The July show opens with Leon Parker's "All My Life" and it takes a bit to get out of the simple funky beat and Conley's minimal distorted guitar lead. The effects are somewhat dialed back and a series of classic rock solos emerge as the 20-minute song progresses. Jason Fraticelli introduces himself well on a more muted stand-up bass interlude, but drummer Dour Hirlinger never strays far from the basics. Compared with many of the other songs, it definitely leaves a mixed impression.
More worthy are a bluesy rendition of Joe Henderson's "Isotope," a heavily chorused pluck/ strum ballad approach to Radiohead's "The Tourist" and the concluding "Blue Monk," which features Conley in a catchy yet varying R&B groove and an energetic closing solo by Hirlinger. One can't really pin Conley's style and sound to a particular player, although some of his well thought-out improvisations bring to mind John Scofield's gutsy yet accessible fusion of late.
One might be tempted to group him with more mellow guitarists on the second improvisation of an Oct. 7 show, at least before it evolves into a bit of a trace/beat number toward the end. Ultimately it possesses the good qualities of those 1970s Miles Davis/Weather Report long-form fusion collages - a lot of interesting ideas for those with an open mind. "Softly as a Morning Sunrise" gets something of a Scofield/Wes Montgomery blues treatment and the entire trio proves themselves capable of respectful modern swing chops of "Days of Wine and Roses."
Sound quality is mostly first-rate as all the instruments are captured and mixed well, although at times crowd noise gets intrusive.
Conley's only album is Ocean Exposition, a self-produced 2004 quartet release that got a review from Emanuel Ferritis of WPRB that stated it sounded like "John McLaughlin's Extrapolation mixed with the ECM sound. Will somebody please sign him?" If the recently posted shows are any indication, there may indeed be more promising releases to come, along with the prospect those who make records take an interest in bringing them to market.

see more here>
www.AllAboutJazz.com/article

Rhythms of the Sea by Daniel Shearer 4/21/04 TimeOff(Princeton Packet)

Rhythms of the Sea
By: Daniel Shearer , TimeOFF

As a youngster, Tim Conley spent a lot of time at the Jersey Shore, so it seemed logical to name his band, the Ocean Exposition, after his favorite childhood playground.
Performing with Electric Jellyfish, the Yardley, Pa., native had been writing songs with a side project in mind. When the members of Jellyfish went separate ways last year, he approached his roommate, Jon Thompson, a saxophonist and performer with the genre-defying outfit named Lazlo, about putting together a band.
They recruited Ewing drummer Joe Falcey, bassist Jason Fraticelli, a Pennsbury High School alumnus, and started playing at Joe's Mill Hill Saloon in Trenton, John & Peter's in New Hope, Pa., Tritone — a club on South Street in Philadelphia — and Conduit in Trenton, where the band will open the Jazz Mandolin Project's upcoming show. Also at Conduit, the band recently opened for the Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey, and the avant-garde jazz trio Living Daylights.
"Jellyfish definitely had a lot of jazz influences," Mr. Conley says, "but it also was very funk influenced. (The Ocean Exposition) went more of a rock way, as opposed to funk. It's definitely a jazz fusion, but its got more of a rock vibe than a funk vibe."
Ocean Exposition released its first studio album in January, a dreamy, well-mastered six-track collection recorded at Retromedia Sound Studios in Red Bank.
"Dawn on the Water," the recording's six-minute opening track, begins with the sound of surf and a gentle line on upright bass. Mr. Conley offers clean chords from his hollow-body guitar, while Mr. Thompson delivers the first hint of a melody, which repeatedly passes from sax to guitar and back again. "Ocean Dream" unfolds in five-measure bars, with Mr. Falcey riding light on a cymbal and punctuating the rhythm with an occasional rim shot. "Laughing Dance" is a playful romp with a Latin feel.
"We basically did the whole thing live, in the studio," Mr. Conley says. "Almost every song on there is in odd time signatures, and it really just kind of felt like water, the rhythms of the ocean."