About

BIOPIC

Je est un autre. Tant pis pour le bois qui se trouve violon. (I is someone else. Too bad for the wood that finds it’s a violin.) -Rimbaud

Alex Ferris was born in New Jersey. He began playing guitar when he was ten after a year as a choirboy. He co-formed his first band a year later and played in different alignments with founding members of it for the next ten years, first as rock, then as jazz musicians. He quit school and left home at seventeen and began playing saxophone which was his principal instrument for the next eight years. After a few years away from music, during which he worked as a fisherman, he returned to the guitar eventually living in NYC and playing with Demo-Moe. During that period and the subsequent decade he absorbed the culture of metal working from Robert Parker and others of the Rivington School and the essentials of mechanics from Bill Shay at Airport Motors. In 1992 he co-formed feral logic. crossing the country several times before they went into hiatus in 1997. In late 1999 he began making instruments with Mike Rinaldi in Providence. In early 2000 he moved back to Chilmark and began constructing the instruments of Anarchestra. In April 2003 he moved to Santa Fe.

When I hear drum machines and synthesizers the images that come to mind are of patients in intensive care units attached by tubes to devises that regulate their heartbeats, force oxygen into their lungs, add nutrients to their blood and "manage" their pain. To me these represent the most joyless aspects of modern living, analogous to the way our habitats have evolved into sprawls of pavement constructed with the goal of making life better for our cars than for our children.

Alex Ferris 2001