Numena is the second volume of music capturing percussionist Tim Barnes in a variety of collaborative settings recorded in extraordinary circumstances over the past few years. Tim is a storied drummer, engineer and producer whose CV encompasses collaborations with a who's who of late 20th and early 21st century music. He has recorded, performed and collaborated with countless artists, including Tony Conrad, Faust, Alan Licht, Jim O'Rourke, P.G. Six, Silver Jews, Sonic Youth, Stereolab, The Tower Recordings, Ken Vandermark, Wilco, John Zorn and many others. Through 2014, he was the proprietor of the boutique Quakebasket label, which documented a variety of projects at the forward edge of improvised and experimental music, including Tim's duo with Glenn Kotche, On Fillmore. Now, Quakebasket has been revived to issue Noumena and its companion album, Lost Words. In 2021, Tim was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's at the age of 54, and he and his family went public with this immediately. The response from Tim's network of friends and musical peers was overwhelming, and beginning in late 2021, collaborative recordings were undertaken, coordinated and assembled by Tim's longtime friend Ken (Bundy) Brown, with whom Tim had worked in the past as a member of the group Pullman, early pioneers of the new Americana movement in the indie scene of the late '90s. The recordings for Noumena feature the playing of Joshua Abrams, Oren Ambarchi, Ken Brown, John Dieterich, Darin Gray, Glenn Kotche, Robert Carlos Lange, Ro(b)//ert Lundberg, Douglas McCombs, Matt Mehlan, Rob Mazurek, Tara Jane O'Neil, Jim O'Rourke, Chad Taylor, Thollem, Britt Walford and Mike Watt. As with Lost Words, Noumena cuts a dramatic swath through a sweep of music styles, all of which are deepened by Tim's versatile, intensely stimulated percussive feel.
