Samuel Claiborne cut his teeth in two radically different genres at the same time in the 1970s and 80's: electro-acoustic shamanic music, both on his own and as one half of the duo Loons in the Monastery, and No-Wave, punk, funk, reggae, and rock, as a member of several New York City bands, most notably the little-known but well-loved trio, Things Fall Apart. The death of Things Fall Apart's co-founder, Samuel's stepbrother Jan Stacy, coupled with a nearly-fatal accident that left Claiborne a quadriplegic for a time, forced him to abandon music for 10 years while he re-learned how to play guitar and keyboards. Loons in the Monastery re-formed and released several CDs in the early 2000s, including Stranger Than Truth. Once more going solo, Claiborne released The Annunciation, the critically-acclaimed quiet, NYFA award winning meditative acoustic piano collection, in 2009. And in 2015, he released the fire-and-brimstone, political and personal rock/experimental solo effort, Love, Lust, and Genocide. He's now busy creating a new incarnation of Things Fall Apart, bringing back some old gems, and creating new work that fuses and contrasts his wide-ranging influences from punk to minimalism, avant-garde electro-acoustic explorations, post-rock, ritual shamanic music, and more, into widely genre-spanning songs.