Bendlin, Brian & Linda Smith

***Opposite of Shadow, a collaboration between old friends (and former THE WOODS bandmates) LINDA SMITH (artwork) and BRIAN BENDLIN (writing), is an exploration of place, time, memory, and the natural world. It is the companion book to Brian Bendlin’s music CD 13 Groves. Linda and Brian have been friends and collaborators for almost forty years. An album of mid-1980s tracks by their band the Woods, So Long Before Now, is available from Dot Matrix / Modern Harmonic. Linda Smith began making music in Baltimore during the early 1980s with various bands. Following a move to New York City in 1984, she formed The Woods with Brian Bendlin, Peggy Bitzer, and Steven Cheslik-DeMeyer. After purchasing a four-track cassette machine during that time, Linda began to record her songs at home; from 1987 to 2001 she released music on such labels as Harriet, Feel Good All Over, Slumberland, Shrimper, and her own Preference label. In 2021 Captured Tracks released a vinyl collection of her home recordings titled Till Another Time. Since then she has returned to recording new music, with Untitled 1-10 Plus 1 (Almost Halloween Time Records), and A Passing Cloud, a collaboration with Nancy Andrews (Grapefruit/Gertrude). She received an MFA in visual art from Vermont College of Fine Art in 2008. Brian Bendlin moved to New York City from the Midwest in the 1980s. He was the first drummer for the band Crash, and has been a drummer and percussionist in numerous bands and ensembles, including Robin Crutchfield’s Dark Day, Nothing But Happiness, the Joan Group, and the Balinese gamelans Chandra Kanchana and Giri Mekar. After the breakup of the Woods in 1986, Brian and Steven Cheslik-DeMeyer released a series of DIY solo and collaborative cassette albums in the late 1980s under the catchall banner Trouble Picnic, including Brian’s ambient album 13 Groves (1987); they also formed the acoustic trio Two Houses (with Lloyd Miller), which played live in New York, London, and Berlin in 1988. Brian received an MFA in writing from Bard College in 1996.