Bio

"original... It has to me, a seductive quality. I want to listen to what's going to happen." - Brian Eno

"While most musicians make "movies", Brian Siskind makes "films". I think of him as an artist first and a musician second. He has a gift for pushing instruments beyond their prescribed sound palettes. Fognode is art for your existential soul." - The Grassy Knoll (Bob Green)

"A high-tech version of early reggae dub master King Tubby" - Paul Griffith - Nashville Scene

"a studio wizard" - Harp Magazine

"Fognode's Beat Hollow (2001) stands as an excellent introduction to the pastoral mode that would characterize indie Nashville in the coming decade." - Edd Hurt - Nashville Scene

"highly regarded Nashville undergrounder" Frank Goodman/Puremusic

"a creative force" - N. Apps/Director, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)


Brian Siskind is an acclaimed producer and ace beat-maker whose soundscapes have been sampled and remixed by artists intrigued by his ability to combine warm, natural sounds with the textures of big-city life.  Working under his musical alter ego Fognode, Brian has worked with jazz musicians, Nashville singer-songwriters and such unclassifiable instrumentalists as Bela Fleck.  His ear for sonic subversion--deep structure, really--makes him a remarkably un-doctrinaire musical creator who allows his ideas to proceed at their own pace.  

 On a superb series of Fognode recordings  (the nickname was given to Brian by musical collaborator Layng Martine III, and comes from the Virtual Reality Modeling language used by video-game creators--a “fog node” is space  that lies between foreground and background), this Southern native has paid tribute to his upbringing with his inspired, original use of the sort of instrumentation one would associate with rural music--guitars, pedal steel and lap steel figure prominently in the Fognode recordings.  

 Brian Siskind was born in Newport News, Virginia in 1972 and grew up in and around Winston-Salem, N.C. Always interested in electronics and pure sound--as he says today from his home in New York City, "I've always been an avid listener"--he wanted to play drums as a child, but waited until he moved out of the house to get his first set.  Six months later he was playing in a Winston-Salem band which he describes as a prog- and fusion-influenced trio. A gig opening for fusion legends the Dixie Dregs gave Brian invaluable experience as a live musician, and playing in his first bands gave Brian the opportunity to hone his chops and get a feel for what works in live performance.  

 He decided to move to New York in 1995 after a stint in college.  Once in the Big Apple, he got a job assisting with live sound for renowned avant-garde music mecca the Knitting Factory.  Returning home after a year, Brian got in touch with Santana drummer and electronic-music composer Michael Shrieve and their conversations led to Brian’s move a few weeks later to Seattle, where he worked as the drummer’s tech and assistant.  

 Brian's tenure with Shrieve taught him a lot--he immersed himself in Seattle's thriving avant-noise and jazz scenes, and began teaching himself how to record the music he wanted to make.  Still, it was his 1998 move to Nashville, Tennessee--home of country music and a healthy crop of young, up-and-coming songwriters--that allowed him the opportunity to experiment with form, texture and altered song form in ways that gave him the freedom to use everything he'd learned from jazz, '90s trip-hop, Laswell, dub reggae and the ambient washes of Steve Tibbetts.

 In transition from Seattle, Brian had made the first Fognode record, 1999's Urban Passer, which was the sound of liftoff.     An auspicious beginning, it marks an intermediate point in his career between Seattle and Nashville, and points the way toward Fognode's 2001 release Beat Hollow.

 Cut in Music City with a cast of musicians that included Dobro player Al Goll and guitarist David Dawson, Beat Hollow sounds like nothing else that appeared in Nashville at the time..  Brian received a lot of good press from Nashville Scene and many other Music City publications.  A collaboration with Seattle musician and physicist Mark Fauver, Beat Hollow employed Fauver’s samples and loops in a process of idea-exchange that hugely shaped the record.  

 Brian lived in Nashville for nearly a decade, working with such singers as Clare Burson, Sarah Siskind, and Cortney Tidwell, and producing a lot of Fognode music.  His work on Burson's acclaimed 2007 Thieves caught the ears of listeners and critics, and Harp Magazine hailed him as a “studio wizard”.

 The discipline involved in augmenting these songwriters shaped his approach.  Recording drums for Fognode projects with a single ribbon mic (he used Cool Edit Pro, an early PC-based editing program), Brian achieved a sound that honored the loose and accidental and suggested sense of place, time and space.  The music looped around, but it felt live--here was improvisational art that honored sound as well as hot lick.

 After nine years in Nashville, Brian moved back to New York, where he takes photographs--often of unprepossessing, everyday subjects.   He continues to record and play the occasional show--as he did in Nashville, where a Fognode performance was something of a magical event.  These days he's a Media Studies major at Hunter College, and he has plans to make documentary films, including a project that will address the issue of urban noise in New York's subway system.  

 He contributed ambient lap steel to Bela Fleck's 2009 Throw Down Your Heart--Tales from the Acoustic Planet Vol. 3: Africa Sessions, and has also worked with Bill Frisell  (as drummer on Sarah Siskind’s 2002 Covered, itself issued on Brian’s Infrasound Collective label), Nashville pop band band the Altered Statesman, the Silver Seas' Daniel Tashian, and many others.  

 On the horizon is a scheduled 2011 site-specific composition for a multi-speaker solo ambient performance at Houston's famed Rothko Chapel, which promises to be a monumental occasion for this restless yet rooted artist.  It's an appropriate venue, since Rothko's saturated abstract fields of color have inspired Brian for years.  Like Rothko, Brian believes in the expressionist moment, and in expression that rejects commercial banalities and accepted ways of recording, performing and thinking.  

-- Edd Hurt - November 2010


 

Fognode has produced, remixed or performed with artists such as Jeff Coffin (Dave Matthews Band/Bela Fleck and the Flecktones), Michael Shrieve (Santana), Bela Fleck, Shane Theriot (Neville Brothers), Clare Burson, Casey Driessen, Sarah Siskind, Cortney Tidwell, Bill Frisell, Oblio, Joe Mcmahan, Steve Poulton, Millard Powers (Counting Crows), Daniel Tashian (The Silver Seas), Andy Tubman, Corporal Blossom (Layng Martine III), Tucker Martine, and many more.