I began doing Public/Community/College radio at KUGS FM in Bellingham, WA in 1985 and was there until 1987. I spent 10 years at KAOS FM in Olympia, WA from 1993-2003 including a one year stint as Music Director. During that entire time, I did the What's This Called? program, at times for as long as 6 hours in a single night! The show ran at KPSU in Portland, from 2005 to 2018. I've been happily at Freeform Portland since October of 2018 and loving every second at this exciting freeform station!
I started the Olympia Experimental Music Festival in 1995 and have been playing music off and on in the Dead Air Fresheners since 1997.
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Pacific NW music writer Emily Pothast recently contacted the band to tell us she had penned a short review of Tales from the Elusive Hangar for the “Noise, Industrial and Beyond” column in the March 2023 issue of the UK’s stalwart experimental magazine The Wire! While we were happily processing this exciting and gratifying information, it turned out that we had entirely missed Tape Hiss Is the Blow Job of Lo-fi being reviewed by Raymond Cummings in the same column for the August 2022 issue! To be fair, we were caught up with the release of Unfriended. on Personal Archives in September, and really weren’t expecting our single piece resurfaced noise collage vanity release to resonate globally quite like it did!
We’re thrilled to have the album we spent 3 years getting the way we wanted being received with heavy play on the best known experimental music radio station in the world. Now onto 2023 and once again we will have a BRAND NEW ALBUM on Kill Pop Tarts coming out at exactly midnight as January 1 hits!
Jerry Soga, legendary PDX improvisor (of Waffle Taco, Xapchyk, fiasco, and More!) visits The Elusive Hangar to record with Dead Air Fresheners in their home studio.
This is the first ever musical meeting of these two explosive forces of Northwest Dada and Kill Pop Tarts is pleased to share whatever enfolds with you!
On September 11th, 2022 the 17th album by Dead Air Fresheners was released to the world by Personal Archives Recordings. A limited number of professional quality compact discs can still be purchased. Don’t wait for Black Friday. We’re all in this together.
In September of 2019 Dead Air Fresheners began toying around with the idea of creating a guitar driven noiserock album. We talked to a friend with a lot of great audio production and engineering skills and some notoriety as an undergound experimental artist about producing it. Lots of Google Drive folders were created. A pandemic hit. Our producer friend left the project scratching their head. Another experimental musician friend who wanted to produce rock bands came on board. And left scratching their head. We started playing every Friday at 5:15 PM online to fight the pandemic until vaccines arrived. Some other geopolitical stuff went down. We continued to work on the album which we called Unfriended. We also had other moments of inspiration that had nothing to do with what we were doing with Unfriended. (including in collaboration with other artists) and so released other singles and albums while we continued to work on this now seemingly mythical record. 3 years passed and we put out a total of 6 other albums while constantly telling the world Unfriended. was coming! We finished it at the Beginning of 2022 and submitted it to the label we’d been talking the whole time about giving it to. They liked it but feared some legal issues that we didn’t have a convincing argument around. So we dialed up Bob Buck Jr. over at Personal Archivesand asked him if he’d have us again on his fine label. A release date of September 11, 2022 was set. We can’t really believe it but that date is upon us!
PRE-ORDERS are Available Now! Over at the Personal Archives site you may order the limited edition CD version or the digital version NOW. We have three sample pieces streaming including the just released “Have You Seen Junior’s Grades” featuring the legendary poet Chuck Swaimwho we had not had the pleasure of working with in over a decade, and first ever for us collaboration with Olympia underground metal guitarist Eddie Shredder AKA Pizza-T! Check it!
We ought to have been doing everything we could to prepare for the release less than 5 months away, 9/11/22, of the fabled Unfriended album on the esteemed Dubuque Iowa label Personal Archives… Instead we went and produced a new album we have put out ourselves on Kill Pop Tarts.
While Dead Air Fresheners have semi-intentionally become a drum and guitar driven avant-garage noiserock affair in recent years, this album may be viewed either as a return to form or absolute regression into electronic and horn drenched ambient drone psychedelic-jazz mindmelt. Forged from recordings dating back some sixteen years, including a live set soft opening the now fondly remembered Portland venue Someday Lounge, then processed with loving pitch bends and wall of reverb in our post-Covid garage studio… this album would represent our 2112 or Metal Machine Music were we handing it over to any label other than our own.
Having career or relationship difficulties? Put this record on really loud and it will sort that out in either the home or office!
A founding member of the Dead Air Fresheners has left us. “Roger” Mathew Moss was 57 at departure from this plane. In 1996 or 1997 he recorded the very first demo for the Dead Air Fresheners, supplied the instruments, and played half of the music on it. Although he never played in the group again after that the resulting recording “That Happened When I Wasn’t In the Room” was finally released as the last piece on our 2022 Kill Pop Tarts album The Last Asteroid. Roger was also the lead guitarist in Seattle psychedelic postpunk band Blue Faces and was an ardent supporter of all of our work. His presence will be greatly missed whenever we play as he would always be watching any live stream we had up.
“A Collection of Drone & Noise Sea Shanties is highly creative and surprisingly respectful, the art punk experimentalists honoring their invented micro-genre from unique angles. The shanties are abraded, restructured and repurposed, the paint cup into which the brushes are dipped. The sea seeps through the walls of the recording, waterlogged words become instrumental passages, and an ailing vessel limps to port, crew ravaged with scurvy, delirious for the sight of land.”
We were honored to be interviewed by legendary Seattle experimental musician and now DJ Eric Muhs on his local music program Back Yard Deep Dive on KBFG 107.3 FM (Ballard Baby!) Eric got us to open up about our performance philosophy we never knew we had and picked out interesting pieces from throughout the group’s history with a focus on collaborative numbers.
While we keep putting the finishing touches on the fabled Unfriended record we once again accidentally recorded and released an entirely different album. The Last Asteroid is both a look at the future and the past for Dead Air Fresheners. The title track has been a single on Kill Pop Tarts with the B-side(also included on the album) “Mining Yr. Space Rock” for well over a year now. The last piece on the record “That Happened When I Wasn’t In the Room”, however, is in fact the very first recording by the Dead Air Fresheners, dating back to 1996 or 97 (we’re not even sure!) Meanwhile there are other older pieces, but also a couple brand new ones, including “Sandy Planet” which the group finished on 12/31/2021 as the album went to press. “Sandy Planet” is dedicated to Sandy McAdams, a family member of the core of Dead Air Fresheners, who passed away just after Christmas.
Dead Air Fresheners end the tumultuous year of 2021 with a new album release on Kill Pop Tarts for 2022. The very first album of 2022 in fact The Last Asteroid. While the album drops at midnight on NYE we are excited to share an advance single just in time for Christmas: “Vacuum Suit Eve” a plunderphonic tribute to the Apollo 8 crew.
We know, we know that we started saying we would be releasing an album of heavy noiserock 2 years ago. We know that. We also fully own that we have somehow released two other albums, plus a collaboration with Bob Bucko Jr. and a concert video in that time. You might be starting to think that despite the string of singles and teasers we keep dropping that this might be a bit of an Eldorado/Waterloo mashup. You might be starting to think. But we really are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel and this new $1 Download proves it. Yes it is another single from the eternally forthcoming album Unfriended by the Dead Air Fresheners. No we don’t want to “Inherit the Wind”. Turn it up to 11. It’s cyclonic.
We are excited to announce our brand new album on the killer Personal Archives Recordings label out of Dubuque IA, and run by the incomparable Bob Bucko Jr., A Collection of Drone and Noise Sea Shanties. Released in a limited edition of 50 professionally produced CDs and unlimited digital albums, this record is the product of years of field recordings manipulated with electronics and other instruments to capture the feelings of labor and the ocean.
October 7, 2021 marks the release (finally!!) of our new album A Collection of Drone & Noise Sea Shanties on the inimitable Personal Archives Recordings label! Below is a preview of the artwork and liner notes, watch this space for ordering and audio release information!
In support of workers rights around the world we will be taking to our backyard with special guest Four Dimensional Nightmare on Labor Day, Monday September 6th at 5:15 PM Pacific Standard Time, LIVE ON FACEBOOK LIVE!
After a mix-up with the power supply guy, Dead Air Fresheners played our first ever unplugged Live from Cathedral Park in St. John’s, Portland Oregon. Saturday, August 28th. Under the St. John’s Bridge as the sun went behind it.
In typical Dead Air Fresheners style we have released our second album for 2021 and it is NOT the still unfinished Unfriended! As the band continues to play live online every Friday at 5:15 PM Pacific Standard Time we have released a live album on Kill Pop Tarts that captures two of the hottest of those sets:
Each of the sets that are featured on each album “side” (as we’re releasing 8-tracks, cds, and digital sides are all virtual…) is featured in a video on the Dead Air Fresheners YouTube Channel:
Our group went through a lot of changes in 2020 from being housebound to social distance our way through Covid-19, to becoming much more noiserock driven in our most frequently visible incarnation. Through all of this we have worked on the yet to be released album Unfriended. In our efforts to document Dead Air Fresheners in our current noisy guitar sound embodiment we tried working with two different producers but ultimately found our aural palpations too personal to work on outside of our garage. We didn’t fire them they quit, and we’re all still friends. We brought in guest stars, and at least one guest star died of natural causes. Will this album be our Inherit the Wind??? We hope not, and we continue to strive to produce and complete the record ourselves in early 2021. This album is a record about the time we are living in #RightNow and we are proud to provide for you the definitive advance single:
Dead Air Fresheners began 2021 with a bang with the release on Kill Pop Tarts Recordings at exactly the stroke of midnight and the start of New Year’s Day of a collaboration with Dubuque Iowa’s favorite experimental music son Bob Bucko Jr. called Here’s to Letting Go. The album was written by Bob in Iowa then sent to the Dead Air Fresheners for production in the form of duets on each of the four tracks (mixed and engineered by Ryan A. Ray). The album is still fairly minimal, on the theme of moving past the good, bad, and ugly of the previous year. While many people are understandably focusing on the bad and ugly of 2020, music such as this as well as much great art and inspirational protest arose from the tumult.
Dead Air Fresheners 