Athens, GA-based Matthew Houck is the founder of Phosphorescent, whose first album, A Hundred Times Or More, was released in the summer of 2003. Previously, Houck home-recorded a solo record under the name "Fillup Shack," embarking upon a well-regarded tour of the U.K. and Spain in 2000.
For our first invitational, we gave a group of musicians the following assignment: Create a song based—directly or in the most oblique way imaginable—on public domain material. Some of the participants chose to work from public-domain recorded music purchased for this project, while others contributed unique covers of older traditional tunes.