Samuel Claiborne (b. 1959) is a former quadriplegic whose work is informed by his experiences of being paralyzed and by his profound gratitude for his recovery. He is a widely-published poet, essayist, photographer and composer, as well as a performing musician.

He is currently speaking and performing in support of his most recent CD, The Annunciation, and is also at work on two books: his first novel, NODding Out, and Walking Through Snow, a memoir of his odyssey through spinal cord and brain damage. He reads his poetry widely throughout the Hudson Valley, and one of his op-ed pieces has appeared in the NY Times. He was a co-founder of the ‘Eco-Couture’ women’s clothing line ‘Earth Speaks’. He is also a co-founder of the ‘Avant-Bizarro’ duo, Loons in the Monastery, which is currently on hiatus. He is twice-divorced, has two children attending college, and one maniacally purring Maine Coon cat.

Artist Statement:
Western theoretical structures can serve as an impedimentary intermediary between one’s self and the unadulterated creative force. Like the religious person who feels that organized religion is an unnecessary filter between themselves and Spirit, I have virtually no musical education and I create most of the source material for my music with no rehearsal or forethought,  in a near-trance, with as little intellectual involvement as possible; a right-brain fugue-state.

My philosophy is to ‘get out of the way’ as much as possible when gathering up that raw material, and then to bring my own self and sense of discernment to the task of polishing and transmuting that raw material. So, later on in the studio, I bring the left brain to bear to process and alter the sound. Sometimes this alteration is very subtle: such as simply changing the acoustic ambience of a piece. Sometimes it is very extreme and radical, involving extensive filtering and altering of the envelope and timbre of an instrument to the point that the original source of the waveform is completely obscured. When I take this approach, the original acoustic instrument, guitar, piano, viola, voice, comes to resemble the wave-form generator of a synthesizer, and the following analog and digital manipulations are analogous to the envelope, time domain, and filtering operations also found in synthesizers. The entire studio, including my hands and vocal cords, becomes a unified entity, with the parts completely indivisible from the whole.

The other driving force in all of my work is the appreciation of silence; building on a scaffolding of the spaces between the notes, and always allowing that underpinning to show through, much as an architect might want to highlight, rather than obscure, structural elements.

Samuel Claiborne was a guest on our online radio show, Champagne Sundays, on September 28, 2008. To hear the entire, unedited show, please click here. To listen to Samuel's interview, please double click on the Play Button below.



To listen to A Kiss, a selection from the CD Annunciation, please double click on the Play Button below.




Recent awards/publications:
2008 NYFA Fellow, Music Composition (for work from The Annunciation)
2007 Poem Sam’s Point (Lichen) received an Honorable Mention in the Vanguard Voices of the Hudson Valley poetry competition and was published in their anthology
2007 Poem Can the Cactus Know the Salamander was included in the well-received anthology Riverine from Cod Hill Press
2007 CD The Annunciation released on the Sonotrope Sound and Image label
2005 the live CD Belief: Makor Plus Two More by Loons in the Monastery released on Sonotrope
2003 CD Stranger Than Truth by Loons in The Monastery released on Sonotrope