Jackson Spargur

Mud Hen consists of Matthew An, Vigilance Brandon, and myself. Matthew and I have been playing music together since high school, and have collaborated on other projects before, such as Funny Engine and Peruvian Sleep; Vigilance is a trumpet player and composer we met towards the end of our time at Bard College. The first time we all collaborated was on Matthew’s senior thesis album - which became our first release, Forgetting, though we did not conceive of ourselves as a band at that point. Our second release, It’s Still That Way, marked our conception as a band. We recorded this album completely remotely over the course of almost a year, with track ideas or drafts uploaded in unfinished states, and then fleshed out bit by bit by other members. More releases to come!.

It's Still That Way, by Mud Hen

Madison Dunn and I became friends in high school, bonding at first over playing Mozart sonatas for piano and violin, and then gradually over a wider and wider range of shared musical interests. We first got the chance to collaborate on a quality recording over the winter of 2016-17, recording a song she wrote when she was twelve years old for a school play. Over the summer of 2017 we put together an EP of covers, which took many more hours of arranging and recording than anything we’d done before. The next summer, and during many long hours in the Bard College recording studio, we did it all over again with another EP of four covers. You can find those albums, and the rest of our work here.

Coyote and the Rathbone Warblers, by Madison and Jackson

I've known Noah since our freshman year of college; we met on the Ultimate Frisbee team, and have been friends since. It’s taken us six years to collaborate musically, even though I’ve always known him as a great guitarist and vocalist. I had planned on visiting him in Minnesota and recording re: Stacks, by Bon Iver, after I graduated in 2020 - but the pandemic delayed that plan until he could come visit the Hudson Valley in August of 2021. We recorded what will hopefully be the first of many collaborations in the church on our old campus, he on vocals and myself on guitar. You can find Noah on his Youtube channel, here.

re: Stacks, by Noah and Jackson

Virtuoso mandolinist Chris Thile and virtuoso bassist Edgar Meyer have released two albums of duo work over the past ten years - the first titled “Edgar Meyer and Chris Thile,” the second “Bass & Mandolin.” Early in the summer of 2016, my friend the bassist David Mercier contacted me to ask if I would be interested in covering some of the music from these two albums. It took an unbelievable amount of work - first to transcribe these complex pieces of music, and then to spend six months trying to raise ourselves technically to the level where performing this repertoire was even feasible - but it all came together, and we concluded the project with a performance in Bard College’s Olin Hall, and then a recording session in the studio. You can find the album here, and videos of the performance (with more mistakes!) here. In late 2017, I got together with my Los Angeles-based bassist friend, and in a quick session we recorded a cover of one of the pieces done previously with David - The Auld Beagle. This track has been released alone in Volume 2, which can be found here. More is planned for the future.

The Bass & Mandolin Project Vol. 2, by Jackson Spargur & Jared Prokop

Funny Engine is in some ways a spiritual successor to Peruvian Sleep - made up as it is of four of the core members of that band and one late contributing member - but there is a reason that Peruvian Sleep is no more, and Funny Engine is here in its stead. Both projects draw from the practices of improvisation and documentation, but Peruvian Sleep was so inherently tied to our shared experience of high school that it would have been impossible to continue under that name after it was over. We hope that by freeing ourselves from the idealogical baggage of those four years, while retaining some of the successful practices of the Peruvian Sleep days, we can take that sound and push it forward. You can find our work here, at Balloon Ride Records.

I Am The Eyes, by Funny Engine

Townhouses Projected was the name given a project which was essentially the recently-disbanded former four core memebrs of Peruvian Sleep trying to make an album in and about the first year of disbandment. We had all gone our separate ways - three to far-flung colleges, one stuck for the time being in Los Angeles - and the idea was to make an album based on intense documentation of our individual experiences during the year. We also gave ourselves the challenge of producing this full-length album using only fifteen-second to minute-long track lengths. You can listen to this work here, at Balloon Ride Records.

Update:, by Townhouses Projected

Peruvian Sleep was about a group of friends at a high school experimenting with music, practicing group improvisation, documenting all of these activities, and then experimenting with said documentation, all the while using only cellphone microphones. It represents a very important period in our lives. You can find our work on the Peruvian Sleep bandcamp.

Charnock Rd., by Peruvian Sleep