no.256 | Ice Scream Hello Shell Song with Joey Fauerso
So excited to share this sonic and visual collaboration with the amazing Joey Fauerso! Joey and I were hired in the same year at Texas State and she has been a constant source of humor, wisdom, inspiration, and a steady balm to the bruising-to-the-soul injurious world of academia.
We have been talking about doing a PSO collaboration for sometime, but after seeing her amazing show, Bedroom Paintings, on view at Ruby City in San Antonio, I was super inspired to make this happen. The show combines mural-size paintings, prints, and even a couch Joey designed, all centered around a 4-channel video.
The installation deals with Joey’s struggles with insomnia and she films herself along with others in bedroom sets created from her paintings and sculptures. For years, Joey has created a deep universe of figurative works that coalesce into inventive meditations on the body, family, and deep stories. I had never heard any of her sound work before, but I knew she played flute and her dad is an accomplished musician and composer. In fact, the soundtrack to the video was a deeply researched and family affair. While the bulk of the sounds were created by Joey, elements feature music by the her father, lyrics by her brother, and text from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s essay The Crack-Up.
The image came from the combination of three of Joey’s visual works. Joey’s paintings are often made through a process of subtraction, scraping away the paint she initially lays down. In the same spirit, but kinda in reverse, I mixed the code up and combined a couple of the images she sent over to create the final composition. I am grateful for the latitude Joey gave me to add and remix her work.
We have been talking about doing a PSO collaboration for sometime, but after seeing her amazing show, Bedroom Paintings, on view at Ruby City in San Antonio, I was super inspired to make this happen. The show combines mural-size paintings, prints, and even a couch Joey designed, all centered around a 4-channel video.
The installation deals with Joey’s struggles with insomnia and she films herself along with others in bedroom sets created from her paintings and sculptures. For years, Joey has created a deep universe of figurative works that coalesce into inventive meditations on the body, family, and deep stories. I had never heard any of her sound work before, but I knew she played flute and her dad is an accomplished musician and composer. In fact, the soundtrack to the video was a deeply researched and family affair. While the bulk of the sounds were created by Joey, elements feature music by the her father, lyrics by her brother, and text from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s essay The Crack-Up.
ABOUT THE COLLABORATION
Joey contributed the spine of the audio work presented here. She sent over a bunch of audio files in which she rhythmically layered her voice, creating a hypnotic beat pattern. I added sub-bass synth, guitar, a clap track, various effects, and a snippet of a field recording of an ice-cream truck. In one of the tracks Joey made, there is a hooting dove keeping perfect time.The image came from the combination of three of Joey’s visual works. Joey’s paintings are often made through a process of subtraction, scraping away the paint she initially lays down. In the same spirit, but kinda in reverse, I mixed the code up and combined a couple of the images she sent over to create the final composition. I am grateful for the latitude Joey gave me to add and remix her work.
ABOUT JOEY FAUERSO
Joey Fauerso is an artist and 2022 Guggenheim Fellow in the Fine Arts. Her work consists mostly of painting, video, installation and performance addressing issues of family, humor, gender, representation and figuration. Recently her work has been exhibited at Ruby City, The Blanton Museum of Art, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, MASS MoCA, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Drawing Center in New York, and New Mexico State University Art Museum. Fauerso has been the recipient of multiple grants and residencies, including a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2020 Joan Mitchell Grant for Painters and Sculptors, a 2021 Sustainable Arts Foundation grant, the Open Sessions residency at The Drawing Center in New York, the Golden Foundation Grant, Dallas Museum of Art Kimberough Grant, the RAIR artist in residence grant, Yaddo, MacDowell, and Kunstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. Fauerso is a Professor in the School of Art and Design at Texas State University, and lives with her family in San Antonio, Texas.SEE MORE OF JOEY'S WORK
This is the last week to see Bedroom Paintings at Ruby City; it comes down 5/10. Joey has a show opening 5/6 at the offices of Lake Flato, with an artist near and dear to Joey, Riley Robinson. And lastly, Joey has an upcoming show in the fall at the Art Museum of South Texas.︵‿︵‿︵‿︵‿︵‿︵‿︵‿
PSO SOUNDSCAPE AT ICOSA
ICOSA COLLECTIVEExhibition Dates: March 27, 2026, to May 10, 2026
Gallery Hours: Work activated from sunset to sunrise each day
This soundscape was created for and packaged with Boom and Dust , an accordion-fold photobook made in collaboration with Jason Reed. The book creates a continuous 58-foot image of a 40-mile corridor of the highway between Midland and Odessa at the heart of the oil industry in the Permian Basin.
The piece unfolds in two parts. The first, thirteen minutes, is the book's companion. It includes acoustic guitar improvisations recorded in the former company town of Texon in the shadow of the Santa Rita No. 1 layered with field recordings of gas flares, trucks bearing down on the highway, produced water lakes, and lap steel. The second, fourteen minutes, is a new work drawn from the same trip. Evoking a late-night AM radio dial scan, it is composed of a cassette tape purchased in Big Spring, Texas set against guitar recorded at dusk at the intersection of Highways 67 and 90 outside Alpine.
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LETS'S MAKE SOMETHING TOGETHER
I love to collaborate, remotely or in person, but if you have a piece you would like to feature on PSO (without contributions by me), by all means, please reach out!Email us at info(at)porchswingorchestra.org
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ABOUT PSO — THE WEB PROJECT
Porch Swing Orchestra is an art project begun on the web by Barry Stone that explores the interplay between still images, sound, and place.Photographs and musical improvisations build a framework for deep listening and visual contemplation. Barry Stone plays acoustic guitar with a Fahey-inspired picking style mixed in with electronic effects, like My Bloody Valentine for a campfire. The sounds of the outside—bird calls, stray conversations, passing cars—become part of the music.
Stone scrambles the code and layers images taken on-site to channel chance operations into new imaginaries.
Most PSO pieces are made on Stone's front porch in Austin, Texas, but PSO has traveled to Spiral Jetty in Utah, the border town of Del Rio, Texas, Maine, and the San Juan Islands.
Each piece consists of a paired image and audio recording taken on site, uploaded to a standalone fullscreen homepage. Each piece is displaced by new pairs of audio and image. Past pieces can be accessed and streamed randomly via the PSO RADIO page.
Since 2018, PSO has collaborated with dozens of musicians, artists, poets, writers, and activists to publish over 240 unique combinations of images and sounds.
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PSO PERFORMANCE
PSO performs live in unconventional venues such as Shield Ranch and the James Turrell Skyspace, The Color Inside, as a part of The University of Texas Landmarks Songs in the Skyspace Program. PSO was commissioned to create a unique set of visuals and audio compositions for the Texas Historical Commission for the Sounds of Liberty Hill Event Series at the French Legation in Austin, Texas.Original projected imagery accompanies an immersive audio experience which can comprise field recordings, acoustic guitars, e-bow, synths, piano, and singing. PSO plays solo and often with others such as Bill McCullough, Leslie Moody Castro, and longtime collaborator Paul Stautinger.
PSO also curated a series of live events, VAST IS THE SEA, at Co-Lab Projects in Austin, in which 8 artists presented works combining images and sound over four weekends.
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PSO EXHIBITS
PSO has been the subject of many gallery presentations. PSO has exhibited in solo shows at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery in New York, ICOSA in Austin as a Soundscape artist, and the Galveston Arts Center.︵‿︵‿︵‿︵‿︵‿︵‿︵‿
PSO RELEASES
PSO has released two full length lathe cut vinyl records, a full length CD, a split virtual seven inch EP with The Reformers, and two Cassette EPs.Releases can be purchased on BANDCAMP or at BARRYSTONE.COM
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To experience selected past pieces, listen to the PSO RADIO, or stream us on TIDAL in the links below.
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ALL NEW PSO RADIO
Listen and view a stream of randomly selected past PSO pieces rendered in fullscreen glory!
Exclusively here at PSO HQ.
Click on the PSO RADIO Icon to Start the Stream
Exclusively here at PSO HQ.
Click on the PSO RADIO Icon to Start the Stream
