Sportsman’s Paradise is a large-ensemble project currently consisting of Kate Bell, Sommer Browning, Rob Fellman, Pete Fonda, Colin O’Con, Val Opielski, and Mathias Sias. Our stated purpose is to create music that merges minimalist practice (Rhys Chatham, Charlemagne Palestine) with the current freakout scene (Sunburned Hand of the Man, Yellow Swans, Vibracathedral Orchestra) to generate bliss-outs and psychedelic mayhem through controlled compositional techniques. At the ISSUE Project Room, Sportsman’s Paradise will perform their Tibetan-bells-and-six-guitars half-hour piece XEAEX and debut a shorter composition for six guitars as well.
Honne Wells hails from America’s Bible Belt South. It is there that he has been mining below the “underground” music scene for the past four years. After settling in Baltimore, Wells, originally billed as the solo act “Honey Waller,” brought to the Mason Dixon line a deep southern depression era repose.
For Honne Wells, the destitution of Baltimore paralleled the desperation of a pre-war America. Wells’ developed his style of over-driven, primitive amplification and performance using pre-war methodologies spit through electrical processes. Although initially a solo act, Wells’ teamed up with Texas based percussionist, Bobby Weiss in further experiments in noise composition. It was also working with percussionist Benji Derdeyn, with a project entitled, “Henri Lee”, that a standardized structure emerged from his previous emotive-noise based performances.
In 2006, Wells left the city of Baltimore for New York. He began experimenting with techniques in recording; primarily with orthophonics and wax cylinder technologies. Today, Honne Wells continues his studies in orthophonic recording and audio documentation. He has given more than a dozen musical demonstrations articulating a focus on acoustic sound. Wells releases his recordings for study and preservation with the local group Yell-O-Faith Archive that deal predominantly with his work, and act as distributor for Wells’ recordings.
Honne Wells currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.