i've been thinking about using Khoomei voicings with old blues style songs for quite awhile. An opportunity fell into my lap when a friend had an opening act drop out on him at the last moment. So i quickly gathered a group of friends (thankfully all much more musically talented then i am), picked a few songs off some recordings i had, and threw together some fresh arrangements. we only had 3 rehearsals to get it all together, but the audience seemed to think it all fine.

Unfortunately, i only thought of recording it at the last moment and hastily put a mic out in the room going directly to a digital recording device with no one minding the levels. So the recording is over saturated most of the time making for some extremely lo-fi audio files. But, it's enough to get a feel for what we were going after.

When The Levee Breaks
Originally written by Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie around 1929 and more famously covered by Led Zeppelin and more recently by Yat-Kha. We borrowed pretty heavily from those later arrangements.

Books of Moses
Written by Skip Spence in the late 60s while he was in the Bellevue Sanitorium recovering from drug induced schizophrenia.

Chocolate Jesus
a sadly accurate description of many peoples' approach to spirituality by Tom Waits which originally appeared on his Mule Variations release.

Kagyraa Moan
A rearrangement of a Paul Pena that i had covered previously.

Dead and Lovely
another Tom Waits song. This one appeared on Real Gone

I Know His Blood Can Make Me Whole
An old spiritual first recorded by Blind Willie Johnson in the late 1920s.