Brawny Prawn

Brawny Prawn is the pop alter-ego of Todd Merrell and his machines. An impossible solo project, Todd writes, performs and produces all the material, which includes r&b vocals, keyboards, guitar, flute, clarinet, sampling, drum programming, and sound module sequencing. With these materials he creates a romantic, yearning synthesis of disparate popular music forms, including hip hop, r&b, ambient, dub, trance, electro, jazz, funk, industrial, new romantic, idm, and dreampop.

Excerpts from the 2003 Brawny Prawn EP 'songs for bashful gods' are expected to be released in early 2004 on sonic syrup.

Single Side Band

Single Side Band is an ongoing collaboration between Todd Merrell and Patrick Jordan, exploring the rich sonic world of radiophonic musical textures by playing processed noise received on shortwave radio and single side bands as a complex musical instrument. Since there are so many sonic variables involved in such a setup, this live, performance oriented, site- and time-specific work necessarily results in concerted music for a solo instrument.

The 1991 work 'SWR' was their first foray into manipulated shortwave noise as music, and in 1992 Merrell and Jordan performed the piece live several times in Chicago at Club Lower Links and Cafe Voltaire, and on a WBEZ Chicago Public Radio broadcast where the composer/performers were also interviewed. In 2000 the piece was broadcast on WRTC Trinity College Radio in Hartford, resulting in so many phone inquiries that the show's host played the piece again the following week.

Single Side Band have since re-named the original 1991 recording of 'SWR' and released it as 'Shipshore' on their electromagnetica label.

More recent projects explore other manifestations of electromagnetic waveforms and their reception via various objects used as antennae, which are then fed into mixing consoles and played as an instrument through extensive audio processing, as well as more discernible radio broadcasts which are then mutated and transformed into ever evolving environmental evocations. In 2000 Single Side Band released 'Self-Modulating Prophecy', also on electromagnetica, which explores these boundaries between the consciously perceivable world of radio's original intent, and the unconscious, hypnopompic world of an individual listener's suggestibility.