Ross-Bolleter

cuke.com - an archival site on the life and world of Shunryu Suzuki and those who knew him and anything else DC feels like - originally a site for Crooked Cucumber: the Life and Zen Teaching of Shunryu Suzuki

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Ross Bolleter Ross's website-warpsmusic

See Ross's 4-21-08 update on what's happening with his music below.

2-22-08 - Ross Bolleter is a Zen teacher who lives in Perth Australia. He is one of the present teachers of the Zen Group of Western Australia and is a teacher of the Diamond Sangha in other parts of Australia and the Diamond Sangha of New Zealand. You can read articles by him from that site here.

Read For Your Benefit dated Easter Sunday 2007 - posted 4-21-08

And here's a link to Yunmen's Bright Light which he wrote in 1991.

But if you read his Wikipedia link you'd mainly learn about him as a musician. He is well known in certain esoteric musical circles for his ruined piano music. There's a good discography there and it lists three books he's done as well.

Right now the home page of WARPS (World Asso. for Ruined Piano Studies) is featuring CDs of two of Ross's latest works - Five and Five and Secret Sandhills and satelittes. There's more on him there under their "people" link which doesn't work except from there. Here's the CD company's page for Sandhills. Look around the Internet and you'll find other ways to order his CDs.

4-21-08 - Ross writes:

Last year I set Kenneth Slessor's Five Bells for baritone and ruined pianos, including ordinary piano 'treated' to the point of unrecognizability using some of the more demented outreaches of Pro Tools. It's a strange submerged piece - corpse perspective, almost.

I'll shortly have a DVD finished. It's called Five by Five - 5 pieces in 5.1 surround. And I'm currently finishing a CD, Cafe Sophia - a follow up on Paradise Cafe, which includes film music, tangos, jazz et al.

I met Ross in Perth through his fellow Aussie and old Diamond Sangha dharma pal John Tarrant who told me to look Ross up when I was there back in 2003. He was working on two CDs at the time. One was for ruined piano. The other featured him on the piano and accordion playing gorgeous tango music - Paradise Cafe. I dig Ross's ruined piano and other experimental work, but Paradise Cafe is what I recommend to cuke readers who tend toward more conventional music. You can order Paradise Cafe through this Internet Superstore. My dear late friend Niels Holm and his mate O'Neill were serious tango dancers and absolutely loved this CD. Me too.

Ross and I played music for each other and he recorded some of the songs I did (some with him extemporaneously accompanying) and kindly sent me a CD with six songs on it. Maybe I'll get them up here at some point. - dc