Ryan Jewell will be jazz drumming along with musicians Robert Heinz, Bret Burleson, and Eddie Bayard at Dick’s Den on Sunday, January 25th. In addition to being an in-demand jazz musician, Ryan has also played with revered noise artists such as Jandek and Mike Shiflet. He has also been a member of Complete Strangers, Terribly Empty Pockets, Pink Reason, and PHS. You can check his new murky psych-folkish group Mosses on Jan. 30 at punk house VVK. “My favorite music is either extreme outsider art that is inept in some ways. Or it’s highly virtuosic.” Jewell explained his various musical passions while sipping tea in a Clintonville home where he was pet-sitting a friend’s ferrets. While Jewell has an extensive and diverse body of work, perhaps his most unique recording was made while unconscious, and literally brokenhearted. In January of 2013, Jewell recorded his open heart surgery at OSU’s Richard M. Ross Heart Hospital. “It was like a birth defect thing.” Jewell said, speaking of the life-threatening misshapen heart valve that put him under the scalpel and bone saw. “It didn’t close up properly. So every time it would close, blood would leak back into the heart. Every-time it pumped; some of the blood had to pump twice. It would pump out and go back in. It would keep regurgitating. And it went in; it made a little pop sound. When I listened to it, it sounded pretty cool. But it’s not good for your body.” The open heart surgery required Jewell's heart and lungs to be stopped in a similar method that is used in lethal injections. There was a one-in-20 chance Jewell could have died. “It’s not like Russian Roulette,” Jewell said of the time leading up to his surgery, “Kinda, in the months going up to it, I thought, This might be my last week. I got pretty good odds in my favor but still, I wasn’t too nervous about it. It was weird.” Instead of obsessing about the possibility of death, Jewell’s primary concern was how to capture the sound of a (hopefully) once-in-a-lifetime experience. “My last memories going in were trying to get a good recording. Making sure it had a battery life and all that stuff.” Initially, he tried to enlist fellow noise artist Mike Shiflet to record the operation but having pedestrians in the surgery area was forbidden by the hospital. So Jewell drafted a nurse he trusted to put his digital recorder on the operating table. Jewell said he also researched the process by contacting a musician who had the closest precedent to his surgery composition, “I sent an email to Drew Daniel from Matmos. They did an album 10 or 12 years ago that was lip-o-suction surgery. So I got a little advice from him, too, about how that whole thing went down. He said that was just a friend of theirs that was having that done. This was a lower risk type surgery.” Around that same time, Jewell had been asked to perform at the International Noise Conference in Miami in February, After the surgery, Jewell put together a seven or eight minute long musical composition out of the open heart surgery while recuperating at the OSU Hospital and sent it to the Florida Conference. “I re-edited it. I cut it up. Layered it and did some things. Made a stereo mix that I sent down to have them play over the P.A. It’s like I was there by remote. I was like, ‘this is why I can’t be here because I had this happen.'” The International Noise Conference played Jewell’s Surgery song to the audience in lieu of his presence as a performer. As far as the actual surgery recording, Jewell detailed it as such, “The recording is pretty funny because you can hear me talking to the nurse. It catches a lot of stuff leading up to it and then you hear classical music. There is 40 minutes of them prepping the table and getting everything set. And then you hear classical music come on. Then you hear them fire up the bone saw. At some point; what you don’t actually hear is when the first incision was made, because you have to cut through some other stuff before that. Then you hear. ‘weehhhh’ (bone saw sound). It sounds like the dentist. It’s this circular bone saw thing. I have a good recording of the slicing of the sternum.”