Jeph Jerman

Born in 1959 in Hagåtña, Guam, Jeph Jerman worked through drum lessons and dance-band drumming before, in the mid-1980s, beginning his own investigations into sound while working at a college radio station. Since 1980 he has released more than 200 works — under his own name, as Hands To, and with a wide range of collaborators — built from improvising with found natural objects (stones, shells, plant matter), crude homebuilt devices, tape machines, and field recordings rather than conventional or electronic instruments. He founded the Big Body Parts label around 1986, releasing cassettes, records, videotapes, and a short-lived magazine documenting the American experimental underground. He now lives in Cottonwood, Arizona.