As listeners of IYHGYHE already know, I love to play with the format of the show. This episode takes that to the extreme. A good friend pointed me in the direction of a Moonshiner in Guatemala who was planning to open a distillery and tourist attraction on a very sacred site. To this site and it's Mayan roots David Mikulenka decided he would also bring his Norse roots. The sacred, the Norse, ghosts, and distillation in central America? Count me in! David's story is amazing and well told, and just the tip of the iceberg from what I can tell. Interestingly enough David decided to use Facebook to send me voice messages instead of making an in person/streaming video appearance on the show and the recordings were of more than high enough quality to warrant a little editing and adding some cool textural backing tracks. But since the episode was being produced in such a different way to start with, I thought, why not make it more special. For those who don't know, I used to be a "musician" but haven't played nor recorded seriously for many years. It wasn't until a couple years ago I even started picking my guitar up again thanks to inspiration from Saint Sparrow himself, Michael Stallings, and not until a recent hang out with my brother Drew Crawly that I was inspired to really attempt to do something "musical" and put new strings on my guitar. As such, what you have here are David's stories, my intro, a bonus section discussing and recounting the myth of Adapa, and my first original recordings in years with some fun textural storm recordings from last weeks storms and some other tid-bits I picked up on artlist. All of these are improvisational musical pieces but I feel like they work extremely well.
I'd love to receive more voicemail stories like this and use them with my original music in future episodes if anyone is interested in appearing on the show in that manner. Just log into Facebook, look me up, and send away. As always, we can keep it anonymous if you would like. In the future, after Kim and I release our Oracle deck of cards we may look into doing an exclusive Vinyl only show featuring unique stories and music and limited to just a couple handfulls of 45's!
Thanks to David for the story, stormy Indiana for the ambience, Michael Stallings and Drew Crawly for the inspiration, Dale Ratts and Dianne Ratts for the guitar, and untrimmed guitar strings for accidental rythym!
Enjoy!
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