I live in Allen, Texas USA, twenty five miles north of Dallas, in what is called a prairie transition zone. I listen to Spark via mp3. I practice law for a living, but retain a love for science and technology related to the degree in physics I somehow managed to obtain during my seven semesters at a university in the Ozark Mountains many years ago.

I grew up in Gurdon, Arkansas, a small southern town with its own ghost light (reputedly a headless railway man carrying a lantern), a sports team termed the "Go Devils", and the international headquarters of the Concatenanted Order of the Hoo Hoo (translation: what railway folks do at the turn of the 20th Century when stranded by rain in a lumber town hotel is apparently to invent satiric secret societies. Life was in this respect once an endless weblog).

One of my avocations is creating weirdbient music. My work hovers in the pleasant shade between ambient, chill, weird and wonderful. When I record music, I use the name Gurdonark, on the theory that one must indeed dance with "what brung ye". The kind folks at Spark have used samples of my work on their show, which pleased me no end. I became a listener, though, who worries less about whether gurdonark gets sampled than what the folks on Spark are exploring this week.

I am a big believer in the Creative Commons movement and in the use of liberal licensing to create a sharing culture in which music, text, pictures and video, as well as knowledge in the larger (and smaller) sense, is shared freely for liberal use. I believe in open source/GNU/CC/freeware and sharing. I am less an opponent of reasonable intellectual property regulation than a proponent of consensual sharing to create a new way to experience (and remix and share) the arts and in particular music.

UK guitarist Verian Thomas and I run a Creative Commons netlabel called Negative Sound Institute which released free-to-download mp3s from fellow travelers in the ambient/down-tempo movements. I also participate regularly at CCmixter, the Creative Commons remix site, where my work is apt to sample anything from a top-notch singer to a lawn sprinkler. It would be fair to say that I take myself somewhat less than fully seriously.

My creative material has been used in films, podcasts, public radio shows, websites and anywhere else in which a spare drone might come in handy. I like each use from the simplest youtube to the most sophisticated radio program. My own listening habits involve a lot of Creative Commons netlabel free releases, as well as people like Marco Raaphorst, Issa, Kristin Hersh and Fabien Claudel who are using innovative ways of getting music to their audiences on a self-directed payment or free basis.

When I am not listening to Spark, I might be listening to a poetry podcast or to the Jodcast , the Creative Commons podcast of the Jodrell Bank Observatory near Manchester in the UK.

I run a small chess club called the North Texas Blitz Hegemony, and a curious yahoo message board called the Feeder Guppy Rescue League. My analog instruments are the autoharp and the mountain dulcimer, but in point of fact I do most of my music on freeware and a 25 dollar software synthesizer called Sawcutter 2.0.

My wife and I have no children, but live contentedly with two adopted dogs twenty minutes from a pleasant hiking trail.

I am excited that Spark aims to be part of collaborative culture. I'm here to listen, and participate.

If you like to share culture, music, text, or ideas, feel free to look me up. My weblog is gurdonark on livejournal.com, and I am the very model of a modern computer user, with the appropriate myspace and facebook, though thus far Facebook appears to me to be mostly a good way for me to play my betters at Scrabble.