Jared Rosenbaum (Hollow Howl)
SPB: How much space in your home is dedicated to music storage (instruments or records)?
Rosenblum: We live in an old farmhouse. Not a big affluent one with beautiful metal fixtures and woodwork. Just a little old house from the 1870s. So it predates the consumer economy and it definitely wasn’t designed to hold lots of inessential goods. A rough inventory of what is crammed into a tiny closet, a freezing attic, and onto a bunch of hooks in the “office” includes two Native American flutes, a Greek tsouras, a Gibson SG, a DeArmond hollowbody, two flamenco guitars, three fiddles, a few handmade instruments that don’t really work, and two steel-stringed acoustic guitars.
It’s mainly the one acoustic guitar, a Yamaha A5R ARE (steel-string, not an assault weapon) that I use in Hollow Howl. We’re a post-punk band but I incorporate a lot of tones and picking styles from international folk music -- Flamenco rasgueados, country blues fingerpicking…
So why all these other instruments sprawled around the small old house? Curiosity about other sonic palettes? The corpses of failed musical projects? Mild obsession? Yeah, probably all of the above.
A few years ago we got a big outdoor shed. We have a plant nursery growing native wildflowers, so in the daytime, we do nursery work there and pack mailorder plants. At night we use it for band practice. It’s unheated so we don’t keep instruments there, but it’s a good home for a variety of mics, PA speakers, my Sovtek amp head and Orange cabinet and pedal board. Oh, and a drum kit. We used Rockwool insulation on the walls and covered it with canvas from Harbor Freight instead of sheet rock so the insulation could absorb sound. It makes a great band practice spot and we get really good practice recordings off an iPhone with a Zoom mic.
Some day when we’re all rock stars (yeah, you too), we’ll all have beautiful big rooms with huge windows and hardwood floors to store our instrument collections and be able to pick up any instrument whenever inspiration strikes. Meanwhile, I’m headed back up into the attic to dodge wasp nests and bats and to see what else is up there that I forgot to mention…
www.hollowhowl.com
