I’m Joe Krause, a multidisciplinary artist living in Detroit.
Community radio, films, performances, music, city tours, zines, sound design, audio theater, cultural documentation, podcasts and so on. Join my newsketter, follow my socials, smash the things.
Thanks for visiting my Personal Homepage on The World Wide Web.
Comedy Bang Bang
Biggs wrote a jingle that made the cut for the Comedy Bang Bang podcast, and I produced the recording.
Retrospectives
I’m making an annual video out of clips from my life for every year starting in 2005.
Psilodump – The Ground
I collaborated on “In The Bag,” a track on this magnificent Psilodump album. I contributed numerous samples, a little bit of music, and brough in violinist Scott Murphy for a solo, and Psilodump ran off with those elements and made something amazing.
Gary Schwartz – Playing With Dolls
I created the sound design for this film first, and Gary animated to it.
Zelda and the Unibrows – Museum TV Station
Rare live recordings of Zelda and the Unibrows music, with rock band, orchestra and chorus. These come from live performances transmitted via Skype to European galleries as part of Lado Darakhvelidze’s Museum TV Station project.
Erie Canal Theatre – Laughageddon
Laughageddon is a six-part original audio miniseries from Erie Canal Theatre. This retro noir comedy follows a failed stand-up comedian in a fictitious 1980s New York as he’s offered incredible career opportunities at an incredible cost. There are also lots of really funny fake commercials throughout.
Erie Canal Theatre – The Thing on the Fourble Board
We remade this classic radio thriller with new cast, sounds and music. Not your typical Fourble Board story. The original version was created for the show “Quiet, Please.”
Erie Canal Theatre – Switchboard Infinity
The most fun undiscovered audio comedy. “Switchboard Infinity” is a sci-fi serial following Malcom and Thalia through the solar system as they battle the evil corporation Wizbit. Made within orbit of Detroit’s Planet Ant Theatre improv community, with incredible sound design and original music. First aired as part of the show “Dance With Me, Stanley” on WFMU.
Happy Atheist Winter Vacation! It's The Atheist!
Trailerama
Greetings all! We have been busy this month. First, we made a new trailer for our Youtube channel…
How Detroit Transit Fails
A year ago, while bitterly complaining to someone working for a local transit provider about Detroit’s ineffective services, he asked me to write it all down. So here it is, presented as a blog post. This post isn’t satire, it’s not about Zelda and the Unibrows, and, frankly, it’s pretty dry. A few things have changed in the year since I wrote this commentary, and I’ve added those at the end. Enjoy, transit nerds!
Kościuszko Fountain
Between Downtown Detroit and Corktown is an anti-pedestrian zone framed by the MGM Casino and some not-very-well-designed “green space”, all overwhelmed by giant roads. Revolutionary War General Thadeus Kosciuszko greets visitors to one wedge of this ephemeral land, once a row of shops in Corktown’s “skid row”, later destroyed by the 1960s construction of The Lodge expressway.
Zelda and the Unibrows – They Might Be Giants contest: Am I Awake?
We made it through round one, which was the paring down of over 100 submissions to thirteen, from which John Hodgeman, not TMBG, was to pick the three winners. We didn’t win. This was really fun and we’re proud of it, though.
Backseat Detroit Tours
From 2013-2020 I provided tours of Detroit to over one thousand people. By acting as a step-on guide for clients, I was about to avoid the complications of my visual impairment by giving a “Backseat Driver” tour. I appeared on TV and in local media, achieved TripAdvisor’s Certificate of Excellence annually, and spoke to grad students at the University of Alabama School of Law. I look forward to relaunching this business one day.
Zelda and the Unibrows – Blissful Cessation
“When you die, you become a ghost, and you get to haunt people, and make parts of the room too cold for no reason. ”This EP explores death from the atheist, Catholic, and Buddhist perspective and shifts in mood from light to scary and back again.
Open Spark Project
This 2012 collaboration with the Tesla Orchestra’s “Open Spark Project” is a presentation of original Zelda and the Unibrows music as performed with bolts of electricity on musical Tesla coils. Paul Szewczyk composed the music – a tribute to Detroit’s elevated rail system, The People Mover – Lisa Raschiatore performed clarinet overdubs, and I arranged and engineered. We also produced this video out of the footage.
Zelda and the Unibrows – Silent Night (film)
We all know that Santa lives forever, and that means he’ll still be around at the end of the Universe itself.
Detroit Ville Sauvage
I worked with French director Florent Tillon on this documentary, a somber and satirical tone-poem about Detroit.