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So much in the improvisatory arts is determined by the choices of collaborators, environment, and performance goals. Guitarist, composer, and conceptualist Brandon Ross regularly creates situations with other musicians and artists to push their collective creativity to new destinations. The Phantom Station ensemble is a vehicle that Ross returns to with soundesign artist, Hardedge, to embark upon adventurous, uncharted musical journeys. The idea behind Phantom Station was to assemble an Inchindividual-directedInch ensemble that could engage in an open musical discourse and instantaneous music-making without the borders of genre or preconceived musical ideas. One of the results of one of these meetings was recorded at Firehouse 12 in New Haven, Connecticut and is presented as Off The End, a fascinating document of spontaneous creation with an incredible cast of musicians, including cornetist Graham Haynes, keyboardist David Virelles, and drummer JT Lewis.Ross began Phantom Station as a springboard for his creative pursuits with Hardedge, an electronic artist, whose singular soundesign work is employed to generate interactive sound worlds with textures and palettes conceived for the settings or ensembles. Hardedge's electronics thus maximize the sonic and textural possibilities without overextending the size of the ensemble. Additionally, Phantom Station became an open-door invitational sound InchcrucibleInch for a round robin of Ross's wide net of collaborators. In late fall 2021, Ross presented two concerts of Phantom Station, one in New York at the Jazz Gallery and the other at Firehouse 12. The band had slightly different personnel for each show but with the same instrumentation, as Ross wanted to focus on the dynamics between his electric and acoustic guitars, Hardedge's soundesign, and drums along with cornet/electronics and keyboards. Haynes and Ross have known
