From MUSIC MORSELS/ December 2004: “Billy Atwell - Surreal Excursions in Non-Silence"
Billy Atwell is a multi-instrumentalist and composer with a vast bag of tricks ranging from new age to metal with numerous stops in between. "Redgate Twilight's" pulsing ambiance is followed by "Bearing Down's" edgy progressive rock and the potent metal of "Army of One." Billy's acoustic guitar prowess is evident on the lovely "The Scarlet Letter." A phenomenal talent who showcases them in many entertaining ways.

From MUSIC ON THE WEB (UK) August 2004 “Surreal Excursions in Non-Silence '03/'04Music composed, performed and produced by Billy Atwell "

This is not a soundtrack album, nor even a regular promo, but a CD presentation of music by composer and musician Billy Atwell. It contains various music – as Atwell says as the tag-line to the accompanying press release "I specialize in non-silence" – mostly performed and produced by the composer. Some of it comes from his score to the documentary film Secrets of Redgate. Atwell is a very accomplished drummer in a variety of genres from rock to country and has studied Music for Film and Video at New York University and is currently studying orchestration and arrangement with Julliard graduate Edgar David Grana. With professed influences from Beethoven to Godflesh, Patsy Cline to Miles Davis, Atwell clearly has a lot to offer modern film seeking cutting-edge non-traditional approaches to scoring – think of The Dust Brothers score for Fight Club (1999) and you'll have a flavour of the musical inventiveness and mayhem on offer. All the music on the disc is technically proficient and some is most enjoyable – 'The Scarlet Letter' from a Lincoln Center performance of "Saffron", featuring viola, piano and marimba is particularly striking, while a cue such as 'From The Ashes' is a forceful Gothic rock instrumental with powerful electric guitar. Other pieces, such as 'Abduction' I found simply repetitive and irritating, while I loathed the dance based 'El Rey Grande' so much I felt like destroying my CD player to make the torture stop. Whatever your opinion, you can listen to the tracks contained on this promo, and many more besides at http://www.billyatwell.com/audio.htm where you can download the music and listen to each piece three times before deciding either to buy the music or delete it. An innovation more musicians perhaps should follow.

From CD REVIEWS.COM, September 5th, 2004By Peter Dolan

Here's something a bit different for you. Billy Atwell is a New York based composer/ musician with a growing repertoire of diverse projects ranging from the movie score for "The Secret of Red Gate", to avant-garde productions like "Saffron". I'm not so much reviewing a CD as the artist-- which is a bit strange for me. The record Surreal Excursions in Non-Silence '03/'04 is more like a collection of short stories rather than a novel. The songs vary in style and intent and they do a good job of representing the breadth of the artist's skill and the depth of his capabilities.He is a talented artist both as composer and performer. I received this disc when I had quite a backlog of others to review so I've had more time than usual to listen to it, and it holds up well. Even the songs taken from outside their context (they are excerpts from soundtracks) stand up well to casual listening.Every artist has defining characteristics-- some signature collection of musical attributes, intuitively grasped, that are as distinctive as handwriting. One of Billy Atwell's is his remarkable use of percussion. I picked those two words carefully in that last sentence. Percussion is more than just drumming, and 'remarkable' is more than just an empty adjective. He is subtle, not overbearing, and it took me a while to notice what he was doing-- everything just blends together so well. In retrospect, I shouldn't have been surprised to learn that Billy was well known for his skills as a freelance drummer-- having served in that capacity for several bands. As of 2004 he is studying orchestration and arrangement with Edgar David Grana. That might explain why my two favorite songs off the album were remixes of different movements in Grana's Jazz concerto-- both of which were taken from the Lincoln Center performance of "Saffron" as choreographed by Sebastain Gehrke.Both tracks have an eerie, compelling feel to them. The jazz piano (both pure and distorted) from the concerto is set against a backdrop of slightly dystopic reverberating electronica, creating a highly evocative subterranian ambiance so tangible that I could see the music.No matter the style, Billy Atwell seems equally at home with acoustic instrumentation and electronica, and most of his compositions feature both. By synthesizing the two elements together he is able to ground his music in the power and richness of the acoustic without sacrificing the versatility and evocative qualities of the electronica. Stay on the lookout-- I think we'll be seeing more from him.

From THE BERGEN RECORD: Sunday, October 24, 2004 Punk rocker takes on Shakespearean worldBy JIM BECKERMAN

Lord, what fools these mortals be! And how noisy! Puck, the troublemaking sprite of Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream," might well put his hands over his pointy ears. Because nothing in the Bard would have prepared him for "Puck'd, What Fools These Mortals Be," a punk-rock version of the classic Shakespeare comedy-fantasy of lovers lost in a wood, and the mischievous fairies who play pranks on them. For that matter, nothing prepared Billy Atwell to both write much of the music and play raucous lead guitar in this production, which runs at New York's Little Theatre, 5 W. 64th St., through Saturday. "This definitely put me in the hot seat," says Atwell, the former drummer of Shirley Temple of Doom, which was for a long time the closest thing the legendary Bowery punk rock club CBGBs had to a house band. For one thing, drumming - not guitar playing - was Atwell's forte. "I'm playing guitar in public for the first time in 15 years," he says. For another, "Puck'd" is totally off-the-wall - by theatrical and punk rock standards. The score mixes Atwell originals like "The Wall" and "The Fairies' Lullaby" with punked-out versions of Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On," Sonny and Cher's "I Got You Babe" and other pop tunes. As for Shakespeare's delicate whimsy, it's been dipped in battery acid. "Puck is not the sprightly fairy he was in the original," Atwell says. "He's a punk rocker in bondage pants and spiked hair and a T-shirt. He's got a legion of scantily clad S&M fairies who follow him around and assist him with his magic. Oberon is a TV mogul. Demetrius and Hermia [two of Shakespeare's lovers] are kind of like a Nicole Kidman-Tom Cruise kind of couple." How did Atwell find himself in the midst of such bizarre goings-on? Blame Atwell's friend Shawn Rozsa, a theater director who had used Atwell as drummer in small-scale New York revivals of "Hair" (1997) and "Godspell" (2000). When "Puck'd," conceived by Rozsa and set designer Kevin Lock, came to New York after being workshopped in Telluride, Colo., Rozsa contacted Atwell about creating some new music for the production. From there, it was only a short step to joining the four-piece band for the show's short Manhattan run. "I was just supposed to write the music, but then I was asked to come in and tighten things up," he says. It's all part of the career trajectory of the 38-year-old Atwell, who left Shirley Temple of Doom earlier this year to concentrate on various avant-garde musical projects. He's been working as an arranger, producer and composer, scoring everything from ballets to theatrical scores (a production of "The Scarlet Letter" at the Jersey City Museum) to a documentary about UFO abductions, "Secrets of Redgate." Does he miss the New York club scene after seven years of Shirley Temple? Not at all. For one thing, he doesn't have time. "I'm busier now than when I was in a band trying to quote-unquote 'make it,'Ÿ" he says. "I'm just trying to push boundaries in all aspects of things I do."

From BEST OF NEW ORLEANS.COM/ Gambit Weekly, OCTOBER 12, 2004:Jose Torres Tama American Mantra and Other Rituals (ArteFuturo Productions)

Jose Torres Tama pulls no punches. In his spoken word/ performance art stage shows, Torres Tama has taken on everything from casinos to interpretations of pop culture. His new CD is full of observations on American culture, some his own voice and some enhanced by the electronic trickery of collaborator Billy Atwell. Torres Tama ruminates on the stereotypes a Latino man must deal with, saying, "I floated in the fragile buoyancy of the immigrant experience." He then switches to a businessman's voice and yells, "I need that A.S.A.P., S.P.I.C." before rapping a verse of taunts between the Sharks and the Jets from the musical West Side Story. He uses song lyrics, commercial jingles and other pop detritus to connect his experience to the experience of the larger culture. In one piece, Torres Tama riffs that Greg Brady may have been a mulatto trapped in white suburbia. Whether quoting the Talking Heads, interpreting the Dr. Pepper theme song or rewriting the Pledge of Allegiance as a commercial media prayer, he weaves an absorbing spell much like the poet Paul Beatty. Although much of this type of art is pretentious, Torres Tama never lets you forget that these are spoken word poems, no more, no less. This does not lessen their power, though, because Torres Tama's critique of our culture is provocative and poetic. Pay attention to what he says because the world we live in is a lot closer to Torres Tama's perspective than what one sees on the evening news and listens to on talk radio. -- David Kunian

From THE DOMINION POST, August 5th, 2004Morgantown grad plans live Webcast of his N.Y. trioBY MICHELLE WOLFORD
When Billy Atwell left Morgantown in 1988, it was to play drums with a punk band. Sixteen years later, the multi-instrumentalist is composing music for off-Broadway productions, films and choreographers. And he's got something new up his sleeve. Atwell, a 1984 Morgantown High graduate, will launch his latest musical endeavor Aug. 11 with a live Internet broadcast of his new improvisational band's first performance. What kind of music can we expect to hear from Atwell's new band, Blanche Mayhem? "It's hard to describe something so open-ended you don't know what will happen." Atwell likened it to creating cells for experimentation, or "watching a paisley-colored sand dune shift." Anything can happen in his music. Followers of the Morgantown music scene may remember Atwell best for his work in Th' Inbred, a local punk band that signed to Toxic Shock Records and did two U.S. tours. He also played drums with Dyslexic Artsehcro and guitar with Shank, Swing and the Divots. He's toured Europe twice, once as a member of El Paso's The Rhythm Pigs and later, after only two days to rehearse, with New York's False Prophets. After realizing that band's 15 minutes of fame had come and gone, Atwell auditioned for and was hired by another New York band, Shirley Temple of Doom. Until recently, he continued to work as their drummer -- but that's not all he was doing. In 2000, according to Atwell, "I got to do 'Hair,' drumming with an ensemble for a production at Third Eye Repertory." He also performed for an off-Broadway revival of "Godspell." Atwell composed a piece for a choreographer from the Julliard School who performed at New York's Lincoln Center. And he was in good company -- other composers featured included John Zorn, Phillip Glass, the Kodo Drummers and the Kronos Quartet. "I've kind of arrived at the point where the concept of a band is not really going to work. Unfortunately, I have too many ideas and too much eclecticism in my taste to put together a band. Therefore I am pursuing mediums that will allow me to be satisfied creatively and professionally. This would include film scoring -- "Secrets of Red Gate," a film about UFOs that's being pitched to the Sci-Fi Channel, and scoring for theater -- in December I did a production of "The Scarlet Letter." And now? "I'm circumventing the music industry and the record industry by releasing my own material as Weed files," Atwell said. Weed files are Windows media audio, available only to PC users. "The artist sets the price of the track anywhere from a quarter to a buck," Atwell said. The user can download and play the song three times with the option to buy it on the fourth listen. "There's also an incentive to file share with one's friends -- it's something like 15 cents, I think, and it gets smaller further down the food chain," he said. "I now have the opportunity to write it in the morning and sell it online in the afternoon." An Atwell composition titled "Needle Point" is now the No. 1 download of that service (www.sharenewyork.com). "It appears I have somehow edged out the likes of Peter Tosh, Heart and Sir Mix-A-Lot for Weed downloads." And on Aug. 11, Atwell will premiere Blanche Mayhem Trio for anyone who will log on and listen. The trio features Matthew Volpe, also formerly of Shirley Temple of Doom, on bass, guitarist Howard Harrison and Atwell, who will play "primarily drum kit and assorted percussion, lap steel guitar and didgeridoo." "Essentially I'll have a mic and an amp," Atwell said. "I'll use various echoes and signal processing. I'll be working with shadows and light in terms of audio." To listen in on the band's opening salvo, log on to www.strangebrew.com. Atwell next project is an independent film, "Chemical Valley 1986." Atwell will write the film score, which will also include some tracks from Morgantown's seminal hard-core punk band, Th' Inbred.