Ethnic Clerks

There are 6.2 Billion people and six times as many sentient creatures involved in Ethnic Clerks, but most of them don't know it yet.

The history of this band really begins in the early Jurassic, before the arrival of the mammals. But that's a long story so we will begin instead in the Holocene, the last receding of the glaciers, the end of the last big ice age. Before I go in further I should explain a little about the Holocene: The term Holocene means "completely recent" This refers to the present geological era. In fact it is hardly even worth defining in geological terms as an epoch, because it is so brief.. The boundary between the Pleistocene and the recent is set at around 8,000 years BCE (10,000 years ago), which represented a marked climatic warming phase and the beginning of the present interstadial (warm period between glaciations). The change is well established in a number of sediments, especially in Scandinavia, and corresponds to the boundary between the European Pollen Zones III/IV, the Younger Dryas/Preborial, and also the Late Glacial/Postglacial. All other ages, epochs, and eras are represented by natural evolutionary and geological phenomena. The Holocene in contrast is distinguished by being the Age in which human activities have had a marked, and for the most part extremely detrimental, effect on the rest of the biosphere. Yet at the same time this age has witnessed the rise of civilization and the exponential development of the Noosphere. The ten thousand years of its extent are too short to see much in the way of the evolution of species and ecosystems, but they have seen the marked extinction of countless organisms. Natural processes of erosion and sedimentation have been replaced by human activities and geographical impacts; the rise of towns, fields, roads, etc. And there has been an exponential growth in human population and knowledge. If the former continues unabated there will be a terrible ecological collapse (which is already underway and will only accelerate). If the latter continues unabated the result will be the phenomenon known as the Singularity. Both are predicted some time in the 21st century. The beginning of the Singularity could be taken as the starting point for a totally new phase of Gaian evolution, the Technozoic (age of artificial life) or Nooarchic (reign of mind). The Holocene is too brief to be divided into stratigraphic subdivisions. So I have, with some trepidation, divided it into a number of eras of general human history and development. There is always a danger here of adopting a chauvinistically eurocentric perspective, e.g. the standard sequence of classical-medieval-modern. But conversely it has been Western Civilization that for the last 2,500 years has had an impact out of all proportion upon the rest of the world. Within the last half millennium the European discovery of that astonishing phenomenon known as scientific method has enabled the West to first conquering through technological prowess, then assimilate through cultural imperialism, all other cultures. This has continued to the extent that now there are at present only tow remaining civilizations on this Earth (Mine and the rest of the world's). Having reached its logical culmination, this process is not likely to continue much longer. Come the Singularity it is likely some other form of consciousness or society will take over the rulership of the Earth. In a last stitch effort, to force my civilization on the rest of the world, I decided to form this band and use all living things as unwitting participants. The plan was working flawlessly until George Bush and the NeoCons appeared. Now everything is moving backwards again. But hey, we Ethnic Clerks will keep on making music, even if we're only providing entertainment for ourselves.

I've never played Dead but hope to someday. Yeah, I like it, living is hella cool. Special Moments? Nearly all of them so far.

Can, we only listen to Can. Oh! And sometimes, we listen to Stevie Wonder, oh and Steve Earle, but only that Copperhead Road song. Well, we like nursery rhymes, but only the ones from Britain. Once I listened to Captain Beefheart while I was in the shower, although I can't really explain where the music was coming from.

We only use violins

The term Phanerozoic - "revealed life" - is generally applied to the Paleozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic eras; the relatively short period during which the Earth has been inhabited by multicellular organisms that leave fossil traces in the rocks. This is in contrast to the "Precambrian", which lasted for a very much longer time, but was characterized only by micro-organisms that generally do not leave fossils. With the discovery of a complex late Precambrian (Vendian/Edicarian) biotas the term Phanerozoic has lost much of its meaning, but can still be used perhaps to define the period of the development and evolution of higher groups of organisms like arthropods, molluscs, vertebrates etc that are still alive and predominant today. For although primitive algae existed throughout much of the Precambrian, this was not the case with multicellular animals (metazoa), which only appeared during the very earliest Cambrian. This eon can also be considered (as suggested by Dr James Lovelock in his book Ages of Gaia) as the modern period in the life of Gaia (following the Archean and the Proterozoic), the maturity or third age of Gaia so to speak, and is characterized as much, if not more, by the presence of abundant free oxygen as by the existence of multicellular organisms or fossil-bearing rock strata