A Brief History of 3HC
The 3rd Hand Collective is a project started at Community Thrift Store in San Franisco by myself and Nick Fowler. I had been making thrift sound mix tapes for a few years after discovering such a tape made by cartoonist and former co-worker Matt Furie years earlier. To be clear, I had been making noise tapes called Ab-Original Compilations going back to my Starcleaners days in the mid-90’s, so it was a natural thing for me to gather sounds on hand-held dictaphone cassette recorders and often carried a dicta around with me for field recordings, impromptu jams and song idea fragments. I always like encouragement for weirdo projects and Nick has a special curiosity and a keen eye and ear for unusual, interesting and often beautiful sounds (and sights, as we will get to). So Nick and I teamed up for a journey into lo-fi. I would leave the tape recorder around for when I wasn’t there and he was at work. I would add to the tape solo and we would ideally collaborate so we could get twice the sonic density of two or more sounds. 
We polished off a 60 minute tape which I dubbed down to MD at a slightly slower speed to add to the surrealist effect, being the sounds became even more unidentifiable. Nick ran off a few dozen copies, made covers and dispersed them all at an underground comics meetup. People gave him positive reinforcement about the tape. We were surprised and glad. We decided on the name the Third Hand Collective because we were getting a lot of trashy donations that had reached the end stage of their earthly lifecycle and were perhaps 2nd, 3rd, 5th hand. At CTS we were shepherding this effluvia back into circulation or maybe to it’s final resting place in the landfill (so sad).
The next phase of THC came together at Adobe Books where we got on an experimental music night bill. I have been doing modular synth since 2013 and wanted to use it as a delivery system to tell a story. I have been collecting clock faces and other glass objects for liquid light shows for a long time so Nick and I teamed up to combine the synth and lights for a dystopian “Dr.Benway” esque story/commentary on the US class war for-profit “health care” system. The idea was for me to make a surgical soundscape with narration about performing a lobotomy-like brain surgery/Fantastic Journey to the Center of the Mind to help the patient suffering late-stage capitalism trauma. Nick provided the operation visual effects using a lot of red food coloring for blood. At the end, the anesthesia wears off and the patient wakes up screaming, his mind destroyed and dies on the operating table. The above is a practice run of one of our rehearsals. We did one more 3HC gig at Adobe performing music for an underground comics festival where we used our original recordings as sound sources and processed them through the synth and effects while we rotated on the overhead projector light show. It came out great but alas was not documented, the energy escaping freely into the cosmic record of universal spirit time.
Nick and I went painting up in the East Bay hills one day and got to talking about how it would be cool to expand the “collective” into further theatrical territory. We could set up a rear projection screen and create old timey film special effects with creative movement. The idea was that once you performed with 3HC you became a lifetime member in a union of the avant-guard community.
It was soon after I was contacted by Craig Baldwin at ATA. I had spoken to him about playing Farfisa organ for some silent films, but instead I pitched him the idea of doing a live seance ritual. He and the Other Cinema folks were down. Marina was supposed to be involved with another possible version of the show that never happened so she was on board for vocalizations and shadows and when it came time to work on this show, she became organizer and stage manager as well. I then asked poet Stephanie Baker who’s work is ethereal, surreal and experimental. She has a great cadence to her work and is into the esoteric. She performed words, foley and shadows. Nick and I worked out several light art “riffs” including the matrix, the exo-screen, and the submersible pump/fountain among others. The idea was to re examine the overhead as a light source and differentiate ourselves from the Janis Joplin 60’s clockface rainbow amoeba scape. Nick has got it down to a fine art as you will see in the above video. I was pleased to add the Farfisa into THC this time. I’d been using it in Warm Spell and it works really great for “live AV cinema”. Craig’s buddy Bob opened the show on the Farfisa and I was a little intimidated because Bob can really play! Craig told me it’s not about musicianship it’s about transcendence, so hopefully I pulled it off. The sold out multi generational audience seemed to like it. Jason Morris agreed to be a plant in the audience and read a poem about the liminal divide. I was pleased. It was a good night. Thanks goes out to our archivist Tom Scharff for cam-opping and audio recording the show.
Nick sat out the next ATA gig which was another version of Operation Theater. This time we had Marina on drums and vocals, Kevin Van Yserloo on violin, Stephanie Baker on poetry and creative movement, Sally Hahn-Morris on creative movement and Sharky Stephenson on light art. 
I did some guitar, but mostly focused on creating physical synthesis human body sounds. I built a few sound sculptures using a slinky, contact pickups, submersible pumps, motors and sheet metal. 
It was another Fantastic Journey cabaret. As you can see above, it was not easy listening. At one point we cut all the lights and Stephanie and Kevin had a violin/circular saw duet in total darkness. Marina’s aria with Kev backing her up on Stroh violin was pretty far out too. I think we cleared out the tender few in the audience. This show had a more aggressive industrial vibe to it offset by the grace of Sally and Stephanie’s outro dance improv using a long and large roll of clear plastic. Some of the comments I got were hilarious. One person said “the sound was terrible”, which I must say, is a compliment. I must retort here: if you want pristine professional sound, there’s a great show you can check out. It’s called Disney on Ice, you’ll really love it! If you’re worried about our sound quality, you are not getting it. Another comment was “it was like the kids performing for the grownups in the living room.” Yup.
Next came our most ambitious 3HC performace to date. Warm Spell provided the music. Nick was back in the fold with his friend Owwi. Sally Hahn-Morris was back with her community of creative movement dancers Jessie Woletz, Antonia Kao and Charlie Arielle Stellar plus Owwi, Nick and myself. 
The show was titled Pan-Galactic Mating Rites. The dancers, Marina, Owwi, Nick and I all got together and made Dadaist/Surrealist masks and costumes. We roughly sketched out a sequence and went for it in a loose and daring grand improvisation. Everyone was so enthusiastic and positive putting this show together. It was really uplifting to extend our 3HC membership. I feel like Nick and I’s plan of a theatrical community of eccentricity had come to some sort of collective fruition. The above vid was captured by Tom Scharff.