About

Contact us at tony@theatreintangible.com.

The Blog: Theatre Intangible

Theatre Intangible reports on the experimental, avant-garde, noise, and outsider communities of Nashville, Tennessee and beyond.  We are a meeting grounds and lighting rod for tinkerers, rule-breakers, and warranty-voiders . . . the fringe, the forgotten, the forward-thinking.

Theatre Intangible is not a cheerleader for the Nashville music scene.  You’ll find many blogs which serve this purpose very well, and I don’t mean emulate them.  There’s a staggering amount of good, bad, and mediocre rock/country/pop music being produced here in Nashville, but it’s beyond our focus.  What we will try to do is highlight the local underground bands that possess daring, sincerity, vision, and a casual disregard for the surrounding machinations.

The Podcast: ~ORE~ Theatre Intangible

Host Tony Youngblood invites local and international musicians to create one hour of live experimental improvisation, each session based on a unique theme.  It’s not free jazz, and it’s not jam music.  Nor is it trance, dance, electronica or any other beat-driven form of music commonly touted as “experimental.”  If you’re looking for solo-trade offs, 4/4 time, conventional song structure, and drums/bass/guitar; then you’ve tuned in to the wrong podcast.  Special episodes feature artist showcases in which local and international musicians play their music live on the show.  Other special episodes feature a roundup of podsafe experimental and outsider music from around the globe.

History:

~ORE~ began in 1998 under the moniker ~ORE~ Prefab Audio Extrapolations, a live improv radio show on WIDB radio at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale.  Inspired by Negativland’s free form radio show Over The Edge, Prefab Audio Extrapolations incorporated cassette recorder field recordings, spoken word records, unscreened callers, and live musicians.  Tony Youngblood founded the show and Startling Moniker‘s DaveX soon became a partner.  The show ran for two years.

In 2007 ~ORE~ was reborn as ~ORE~ Theatre Intangible on the airwaves of 91.1 WRVU Nashville.   This iteration sought to explore new musical territory by open-source experimentation.  The idea was that these experiments could be done quickly and with little effort.  Thus, if the experiments failed, nothing was lost.  More often than not, the experiments yielded compelling results.  Mostly arhythmic and mostly instrumental, ~ORE~ was produced by a revolving set of talented musicians from Nashville and beyond.

In 2009, Theatre Intangible was permanently banned from WRVU for the episode “Get It On With Dave Cloud.”  It allegedly violated community decency standards.  ORE’s removal sparked a firestorm of protests from listeners and participants.  In the coming months, three more shows were banned or suspended from WRVU; and in December of 2009, 25 community member shows were removed in an coup-like act by WRVU’s board of directors.

Theatre Intangible continues to produce new episodes, recorded in the basement studio of host Tony Youngblood.  The podcast features selections from all three iterations.

The Host: Tony Youngblood

Skeptic, vegan, rock climber, musician, film and beer snob, Tony Youngblood grew up in Mayfield, Kentucky — population 10,000 and hometown of author Bobbi Ann Mason and America’s Got Talent winner Kevin Skinner.  Growing up in a small southern town, Tony found solace in authors like Phillip K. Dick and Jack Vance, through international cinema, in making stuff, and in tearing things apart.  In high school he was selected for Student-Produced Week at Channel One News, a news program for teens broadcast in high schools across the United States.  There, he was given the job of special effects camera operator, a title created specifically for him.  Tony won the position through a submission reel composed of clips from his high-school television show Musical Obscurity, in which Tony made Stan Brakhage-like experimental videos set to his favorite rock songs.  Tony graduate from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale with a BA in Cinema & Photography.  There, he produced the award-winning experimental short film Mesheen.  Since, he’s lived in Los Angeles and San Diego, California, back to Mayfield, and now resides in Nashville,Tennessee.  Tony works as a systems engineer at a home health care company and leads a double-life as a rock-n-roll musician.   He’s a member of the groups Secular Life, Nashville Skeptics, and Nashville Beer Society.