‘In those pre-Buchla Box days, we cobbled together whatever odd bits of equipment we could beg, borrow, steal and occasionally buy to coax whatever squeaks and chirps or sequences of noises we could from their complaining depths.' -- Ramon Sender.

Ramon Sender is a legendary figure in the Bay Area scene - paving the way for the San Francisco Tape Center with Morton Subotnick (Silver Apples of the Moon) and Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley & Tony Martin at the dawn of the 1960s & organizing groundbreaking multimedia happenings like Desert Ambulance. In subsequent years, he played an active role with the San Francisco Diggers - the anarchist guerilla street theater group that challenged the emerging counterculture-and co-founded the legendary Morningstar/Wheeler (Ahimsa) Ranch communes with Lou Gottlieb and later the Peregrine Foundation (for people "living in or exiting from experimental social groups").

In an ongoing program of releasing material from Sender’s vaults, locust has issued two discs to date: Worldfood (2004) & the vinyl only Desert Ambulance (2005).

Worldfood is a wild, psychedelic warble & drone of looped, overlayed tape pieces produced by 'goosing' an ampex tape player with a computer calibration device. The resulting two pieces -- 'Worldfood III (To See With my Eyes)' and 'WorldfoodX!!' -- both part of a number of variations in a series -- make for gorgeous, careening sungazing music. Worldfood made the Wire’s top 50 records of 2004. 2005’s Desert Ambulance lp is another dip into the playfully enigmatic tomfoolery of senor Sender. 'Kore' (1962, dedicated to his daughter Xaverie, 1955-1989) is another classic unearthing of squiggly & eerie tape manipulation cut in the small attic studio Ramon put together at the Tape Music Center in 1962. The flip is the long-anticipated release of his best known work - 1964s 'Desert Ambulance' -composed for Pauline Oliveros.

below ramon purring to nirvana