Writing

Top 35 Albums of 2025

Lucy Gooch – Desert Window Listen/Purchase Desert Window sits somewhere between folk song and dream logic. Lucy Gooch’s layered vocals and soft electronics recall mid-era Björk and Kate Bush at their …

I'm Gettin' Too Old To Do That!

The Age Behind the Words There is a moment, somewhere in the middle years, when you hear yourself say it. I’m gettin’ too old to do that. It comes out quiet, almost courteous, the way …

Top 35 Records of 2024

First Ten Standouts Alan Licht – Havens listen/purchase I’m not sure what else needs to be said about Alan and his guitar music. This new album explores repetition and subtle morphing pieces …

Top 35 Albums of 2023

First Ten Standouts Pale Blue Eyes – This House listen/purchase Layered melodic synth pop that recalls German motorik, Ulrich Schnauss production, and The Engineers – Always Returning era recordings …

The Arts, Technology, and Sport

These are my year-end totals for running over this past year. A year in which I spent the first three weeks of January having numerous invasive health tests done, which limited my ability to get out …

Top 35 Albums of 2022

There were a lot of amazing albums released this year. As per usual, I’ve spent countless hours engulfed in new releases along with the albums of the past that I love. I couldn’t possibly …

Top 25 Records of 2021

As I do every year, I wanted to share my favorite albums/recordings from this past year. There are 25 recordings here that I really connected with throughout the year. These are in no particular order …

Ridiculed By Their Waves of Trauma

Over the last few months, I was given the okay to start running again. I had missed it terribly. Running long distances has always been something I’ve not only had a penchant for but has also …

Dutch NPR Interview

A couple of months ago I was interviewed by Simone Walraven for her Songlines program on Dutch NPR. We talk about a lot of different things: my music, agroforestry, ancestral trauma, nature …

New album "A Day in Bon Aqua" released

What a day it was! A few bats emerged to fill the expedited spring twilight to eagerly dive-bomb unsuspecting insects that must be confused by the unanticipated elements. Adept at moves usually …

Prepared Guitar Interview… 13 Questions

Recently I was approached by the wonderful Prepared Guitar weblog, which is written by the admirable Miguel Copon. Miguel is a professor at the Instituto de Arte Contemporáneo in Madrid, Spain. I …

FMRL Arts

Over the last few months, my friend Chris Davis and I have been putting on shows in Nashville as FMRL. We’ve already hosted a number of wonderful events which have included the likes of Jason …

Recording from recent show…

FMRL Presents a Spectrum of Guitar http://fmrlarts.org/2014/08/27/fmrl-presents-a-spectrum-of-guitar-w-sir-richard-bishop-tashi-dorji-and-tate-eskew/ Line-up order: Tate Eskew – Set starts at 0:00 …

New album entitled Oldowan out now…

My newest release, oldowan, has been released on Functional Equivalent Recordings. You can buy a limited edition cassette (48 of them made), which is an imprinted cassette within a black muscletone …

New EP “oldowan” Artwork and Tracklist

Here is the artwork for the new EP I will be releasing soon on cassette and digitally. It’s minimalist guitar drone in 2 pieces with each being 11 minutes long. I have two other releases nearing …

Automating Dynamic DNS updating with AWS Instances and Route53

UPDATE: This information is long out of date. With the release of the awscli toolset in pypi years ago, things have changed a bit. Also, Amazon is forcing you to VPC on new accounts (years ago now). I …

Permaculture, where do you start?

Just ask anyone that knows me and they will surely tell you that I am constantly spelling out the virtues of permaculture. After they hear my passionate ramblings, they are often as excited as I am …

Open Source Ecology

I’ve written about Open Source Ecology a while back. I think it’s a super important project and I’m always keeping up with how things are progressing. They’ve recently created …

Homestead Land Searching

Last week we were out driving trying to find a possible site for our eco-village. A cold front was coming from the north and could be spotted through this hollow.

Permaculture – Revolution Disguised as Gardening

Latest happenings…

It’s been quite some time since I have updated here. There’s been a lot going on and I’ve been trying to stay focused on the projects in the hopper. Over the last 10 months or so, …

Interviewed by Maurice Barrett

Tate Eskew @ Dave’s Place from maurice barrett on Vimeo.

My new album, Semiotics, released today…

This has been a long time coming, but as of today my new album Semiotics comes out today on Function Equivalent Recordings. I’ve spent an immeasurable amount of time on this recording. It has …

New Video – Calm Future off of Modality EP

Here is the new video for the last track off of my newest ambient/noise EP. The track is called Calm Future. You can buy the new EP HERE.

My new ambient/noise EP entitled Modality released today…

Today my new ambient/noise EP entitled Modality is available to the public. I’ve been writing, improvising and recording this type of music for years, yet this is my first release to the public. …

New Project…The Peasant Revolt – Calling Out

About three and half years ago, I spoke with Caldwell, from The Bubblegum Complex, about doing a record together and it really never panned out as we got caught up with life. With my new record in the …

Help Craig Schumacher of WaveLab Studios

Craig Schumacher is a wonderful engineer and needs some help. He is the owner/operator of WaveLab Studios in Tucson where, among many others, he has recorded; Neko Case, Calexico, DeVotchKa, Animal …

Patrick Krief – Zero Art Session – Recorded Live to 2-track on May 3rd, 2007

A few years ago I had the pleasure of sitting in my studio with my friend, Patrick Krief, and recording the 4 songs below. He was in town performing with his band, The Dears, and we were able to get …

Brian Dettmer – Featured Artist

 Brian Dettmer – Integrated-Electronics I’m always on the lookout for art and artists that inspire me to create my own works. Luckily, once …

Philip Glass – Train/Spaceship Parts 1 & 2 from Einstein on the Beach

There aren’t too many times in my life where I’ve felt completely overwhelmed and engulfed by a live music environment. When those times hit and the goosebumps don’t go away, I …

Zero Art Studio final floor plan

Well, I think this is the final floor plan that will be built starting around the first of the year. I’m still waiting on a few quotes for different parts of the construction, but I have a …

thankful…

my wife, my son, my daughter, my entire family passionate friends — past, present and future health ability to reason science music ability to use all of my senses human compassion human and natural …

Open source ecology…

Every once in awhile I will come across a project that I absolutely love and get excited about. This is one of those times. Take a look at the video below and then go to Openfarmtech.org and read …

Demo – Tate Eskew – Comet Is Closer

Here is another demo. This song is was actually recorded for my record, Semiotics. This is the first demo I did for this song on a 4-track cassette. It’s only guitars and some of the parts have …

Old demos come to see the light of day- Demo – Tate Eskew – Waking Up

So, I was thinking the other day that I should just start posting old demos of songs that I have laying around. My friend Chad was kind enough to dig through old CDs and old computer drives to find a …

Zero Art Studio – new design

I believe Amy and I are really close to being able to start working on the new studio. I’ve gone through tons of iterations of the studio design and I’m ready to add another. this one has …

Sun Boxes by Craig Colorusso…

I must say that I absolutely love this concept and delivery. I’ve designed similar boxes as prototypes, but here Craig delivers them into a wonderfully immersive experience. Bravo!

What a year!

Well, nothing like not posting for a year and coming out swinging. By the subject of my last post, I’m sure all of you know what I have been up to over the past 10 months. That’s right, …

Ruby Arrives

Well, we did it (Actually, Amy did it). We had our beautiful baby girl. As you can see by the lack of posts here, we’ve been just a tad busy with everything. Mostly we’ve been staring at …

Whoa, see ya summer…

I’ve been crazy busy, what with the baby coming, taking care of this 5 acres of land, staying in San Francisco for a week, and on and on. Watch out summer, you’ll be gone soon and …

Summer heat and new songwriting

Well, the summer heat has put its filthy hands on Middle Tennessee. the good part is that the garden loves it and fresh strawberries were picked just last week. Incredible… Believe it or not, …

Zero Art Radio podcasts…ALIVE…

I started Zero Art Radio 12 years ago this October. We went through a lot of crazy times and fights with large labels and in the end it was just costing too much money to keep up the labor of love in …

New year, new ideas, and work

Well, that first month didn’t take long to pass, did it? I kept busy over the last month by starting a pretty nice exercise regime, building a whole new infrastructure for work, and getting the …

Bandcamp and quality

You know, we engineers spend ridiculous amounts of money on preamps, compressors, eq, etc., yet when all is said and done, the end result is compressed into some horrible sounding mp3 file and …

Bands In Town

Bands in Town is something I came across today and it seems pretty cool. It shows a tag cloud of artists that are playing in a specified area and the dates when they play. It will even let you take a …

There actually may be a hell

…or maybe there is a hell in the making and it’s practicing the heating technique here in Middle Tennessee in early June. Anyway, it’s damn hot and if you plan on doing anything outside, …

Settling in the new house

Well, it’s been a few weeks. We are getting settled in the new house and I think I’m going to set up to record some stuff while we plan the studio design for the build out on the back …

Week 10 – Weekly Song Experiment – Pneumonia

I’m not sure how I did it this week. I started recording this song at 9 o’clock tonight. It’s now 10:21. I recorded this up in the bonus room bathroom. I’ve been sick as all …

Week 09 – Weekly song experiment – Song For a Former Friend

Here we are at week 9. I have no idea how I wrote and recorded a song this week. This week we moved everything out to our new house and we have tons of sorting and unpacking to do. This week’s …

Multi-touch interaction screen…

I was recently looking into the lemur as something to use to control live performances via a touch screen and got really into some of the technology used. So, I started digging deeper to see what else …

Week 08 – Weekly Song Experiment – Quiet, Tired and Other Things

This week was a complete blur. In fact, tonight is the only night I was able to record and it was performed under very heavy eyes. We are in the process of moving to our new house and there is a lot …

Week 07 – Weekly Song Experiment – My Son

Here it is. This week’s installment of the weekly song experiment. This week’s song is about our son, Daniel and I conned my wife Amy into singing it with me. I think she did a great job …

Week 06 – Weekly Song Experiment – Powered by Fear

This week I was able to sing again. The head cold has passed. I was able to knock this song out within a few days this week. We’ve been incredibly busy working on the new house so that we can …

guitar rising…

well, it seems that someone has finally figured out a way to use a real guitar plugged into your pc soundcard to control a “guitar hero-like” game called guitar rising. (sorry for the …

Week 05 – Weekly Song Experiment – The Middle Way

I’ve had a head cold all week so I wasn’t able to write anything with lyrics, so what you get is another instrumental piece. This week’s song is entitled The Middle Way. Pushing …

Metasonix G-1000 amplifier

I’ve always loved whatever Eric Barbour over at Metasonix was up to, but this is something that I can really get behind. I’ve wondered in the past why someone with incredible vacuum tube …

Week 04 – Weekly Song Experiment – Your Plan

Well, here it is. This week’s song experiment. Head over to the weekly song experiment page to listen or download the new song – Y_our Plan_

Week 03 – Weekly Song Experiment – Oblivious

The new song for my weekly song experiment has been posted. I also added links so you could download them in Ogg format if that’s your bag. During the week sometime I will probably add links to …

donation buttons…

i’ve actually taken the time to put a donation button scheme together. you can select your level of sponsorship by going here. once there you can choose one of 3 levels (amounts of money). the …

Week 02 – Weekly Song Experiment – Deny the Anxiety

Well, I’ve managed to get another song done this week. You can check it out over at the weekly song experiment page. The weeks are getting quite busy as I have a lot of things to do over the …

Week 1 – Weekly Song Experiment – Bring It All To Me

I’ve decided to start a new weekly song experiment for 2008. You can read about it on the weekly song experiment page. I’m not sure how I’m going to cram this into the limited time I …

Music and the brain…

Amy, my wife, got me the new Oliver Sacks book Musicophilia and it’s really incredible. I’ve just started reading it, but the book grabs you at the preface. I’ve read one other sacks …

david byrne – other peoples problems

there is a fantastic david byrne article over at wired magazine’s site. i love pretty much everything david byrne does, yes, even that crazy french shit on one of his recent albums. he’s …

armadillo run

okay, tad turned me onto this and now i have to send someone over to snuff him out. it’s goddamn addictive. this is a warning to you all. absolutely do not download this. actually,go …

summer coming to an end…

well, a whole summer has passed since my last post. we’ve been incredibly busy building a new house on 5 acres east of Nashville. we are really excited and can’t wait to get our things …

Moving and life…

Well, we close on a new house later this month so everything regarding the studio and album is kind of on hold until everything can be settled. the new place will be on 5 acres east of Nashville. The …

Records and studio update

It’s a good time of the year. Things are incredibly busy here as of late. I just finished tracking basics for the new Sequoia album here at Zero Art Studio and spirits are high there. I’ve …

Looking for trumpet and cello…

I just wanted to let everyone know that I’m looking for a trumpet and/or cello player to play on the record. Progress is being made on the album and I would like to add a few more players to the …

rough carpentry…

this past weekend i managed to build an old style slat bed/couch for the studio, using chisels and all. the utilitarian lounging device, as i like to call it, will also act as a nice bass trap for the …

tateeskew.com in the works…

this will be the official page of tate eskew. this site will contain information regarding the music and projects that tate is involved with and it will also showcase the newly built zero art …