Jam Band Techno

Seek in the Internet Archive’s audio catalog (archive.org/audio), and you might just find. Several years ago, the String Cheese Incident, a noodle-rock jam band, turned some of its recordings over to a pop-minded technologist, DJ Harry, the result of which was a recommended album (The String Cheese Remix Project) of techno music fabricated from sun-dried straw and wildflowers. A search at archive.org yielded two live concert results of this union, one from July 15, 2000, and another from November 26, 2004. The latter, recorded at the Tweeter Center in Camden, N.J., features Harry joining SCI onstage for an encore. Titled “On the Road,” it starts off in space-rock zone but soon solidifies into the Deadheady music one expects from SCI, but then it breaks open wide for an extended bit of looping (focused largely on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech) against SCI’s backwoodsy ensemble. Some caveats: the music is encoded as an “SHN” file, a so-called “lossless” (or hi-fidelity) format that is (1) really large (65.5 megabytes for about 10.5 minutes of music) and (2) kinda hard to play, because not a lot of MP3 players support it (there is a plugin for Winamp software). Oh, as for that July 15 track, it’s only downloadable as part of a zipped 3.2 gigabyte file. Save that for another rainy day. Search for “harry string incident” at archive.org.