- (Bob Freville of Kotori Magazine)

This Ohio-bred madman is a beautiful creature, his words and musical notes two intersecting bolts of lightning in a cauldron of modern musical piss. An artisan who wields many instruments (guitar, bass, drums, samples, mic, etc.), Joseph A. Peragine plays music with a passion that could only be born of serious pain and many somber days spent sitting deep in somnambulist thought.

The thread that runs through his music is his self-proclaimed personal struggle with paranoid schizophrenia. And as only schizophrenics can, Peragine imbues his music with an ingenious mixture of careful keys and layers of timbre.

Maybe I am reading wrong, but his song titles seem so long that I am not entirely sure which one I am listening to, but such is the case with a techno-crawl. You miss things. That's why the mainstream media relies on you to rely on them for fast newsfeeds along the bottom of a screen that's already throwing ugly distracting images at you.

Peragine is familiar with these ugly, distracting images. He has dealt with them firsthand and writes about them with a dual dose of tenderness and braced awareness. There is a soft, almost cinematic sarcasm to the female intro to that song that seems to have seventeen names, when the girl says, "You know one of us has to die, right?"

It is this world-weariness, and not Peragine's alleged "avant-garde" style, that makes him worth watching if not obsessing over. Perhaps some of the psychosis is crafted, like the press picture of him in the kitchen with his hand over an open flame, but even if it is it's still a much more attractive lie than the ones we are used to...no mankerchiefs or glam-emo pretensions here.

And the acoustics are some of the best and fastest in ages. Check him out