books, baseball and music

been writing a lot lately, making some good progress on the new onlyone record. some shapes and colours are becoming apparent, and the new stuff has a wild sound to it. very excited about this.

just got word about a baseball-related recording project that will be very time-sensitive. gonna start working on that tonight. this will be really cool if it pans out, and i think it could. i'll be in pretty stiff competition with some production houses across the country, so it's by no means a given. but what fun anyway! my hat will be in the ring with the rest of 'em, and why not me, huh?

next week i'm helping T Max record a demo of his anti-war song for later production with a full band. that'll be cool, as i've played with T before but have never had him over for recording in the studio.

just finished reading this GREAT Teddy Roosevelt book The River of Doubt, about his trip through the Amazon rainforest surveying an as-yet-unsurveyed major tributary of the Amazon River in Brazil. very well-written, quite a page-turner. and very informative, too. it wasn't happy just describing the adventures of the group, which were many and each more dangerous than the last, but it also delved into the extremely diverse ecology of the rainforest, the isolation of this portion of the world and its unique effect upon the evolution of species within its basin, South American history and more. one of the more surprisingly fascinating detours was a foray into the myriad of different tree species and how they compete for their reproductivity.

an amazing book. i was disappointed to finish it so quickly. this morning on the way out i grabbed It's A Slippery Slope, by Spalding Grey. this was one of the books i got Lexi for christmas. she's already finished them, and i thought if she's such a big fan of his work he's got to be pretty awesome. i'm only familiar with the staged monologues, and i use "familiar" here really just to mean that i've seen them once. just Monster in a Box and Grey's Anatomy.

i saw Grey's first, and it really put me off right from the top.

**** darrell, if you're by chance reading, you'll want to skip this part. ****

the beginning was various "real people" in interview clips describing in succession some sort of horrible eyeball-related accident that they had experienced, and they each describe it with some curious detachment ("...and i looked in the mirror and sure enough there's this 6-inch hunting knife sticking out of my eyesocket..."). and one of them would've made the point. but there were like six in succession.

**** d-man -- you can tune back in now ****

so, that being the introduction to mr. grey's work, this is how familiar i am with him. once the heebie-jeebies subsided, i did finish Grey's Anatomy, and it was quite good. Monster in a Box was even better. i like his style.

so anyway, i'm only a few pages or so into Slippery Slope now. but it flows nicely. enjoying it a lot so far.

wish me luck on the baseball piece!

the passing of a great soul

i just got word that my friend Jon Erik Johnson has passed.

it may sound weird (although perhaps decreasingly so in this digital age), but i had never met him in person. we both move about in close circles, share many of the same friends, etc., but our interaction was mainly through a message board. but over several years of this, one can really get a sense of the people there.

JonErik was a moderator of The Board, and it didn't take long at all to see that he was kind, fair, both highly respectful and respected by all, and incredibly intelligent and knowledgeable about a variety of subjects. and he was a stellar upright bass player, too.



i wish i got to spend real time with him, but i'm glad that i had at least the connection that i did, and do, have to him.

of course, my heart goes out to his family, especially his brother Scott. but Jon Erik also had a lovely girlfriend -- Izumi -- in Japan that he would visit whenever he could, regalling us afterwards with pictures and stories of Japan, the sites, the customs he was assimilating himself into, etc. and my heart breaks for her and her loss.

a surprising day to say the least. our local music community has lost a wonderful person. but we are all much richer for having him in our lives in whatever capacity we did when we did.

rest in peace, Jon Erik Johnson. we'll miss you very much.

MLK day

what a rainy and messy day! the weather report claims this is what we'll be enjoying 'til tomorrow, too. no worries. i don't mind it like this. although when the weather's like this i'm often more inclined to stay in the studio. and i can't do that -- banilow rehearsal tonight.

yeah, we've got the next banilow show this thursday at the abbey lounge, and we're expecting it to be a sweet and upsetting show for all. for the first time we'll have horns! well, notwithstanding Packy's sitting in with us for a few songs at the Boob Toob extravaganza a couple of years ago. but we'll have (PLURAL!) horns at this one! trumpet and tenor sax, played by two good friends and phenomenal musicians that i'm thrilled to have sitting in with us.

last week we were contacted by The Dig to be interviewed for the Defend Yourself column. so that'll hit the streets wednesday. and the Block Island Music Festival requested us to submit for consideration, too. supposed to be pretty cool, and i've never been there either. what the hell, right?

yesterday Kirkdorffer came over sans guitar to go over some of the stuff we recorded new year's eve, and we spend a delightful few hours deconstructing and reconstructing and sculpting until we've got about two minutes worth of structured music. sounding pretty good, and quite different from the first track we did.

we also kept checking in on the Pats game and, before that and more loosely, the Bears game. the Pats game was very exciting and stressful, so we pretty much sat at the edge of the sofa for the whole fourth quarter, ignorant of the studio gear humming along a few yards to our right.

as i said, a delightful afternoon.

Mastodon

i just got the new Mastodon record recently.



holy crap, the tune Colony of Birchmen kicks my ass six ways to sunday. the whole record is really good. really digging it.

and onward into the new year

so we're a week into the new year now. so far it's been a lot of working/ playing in the studio plus getting back into the swing of things at work.

last week i got the new Kaoss Pad KP-3. very sweet so far. i love those things.

new year's eve, kirkdorffer came over and we laid the foundation for two more new tracks. i spent the better part of the following week editing parts of our recording experiments and playing into shorter, usable soundbites and putting together sample maps with them. however, i still have to dig through and start sculpting some form into them. they both sound really good already, but you know -- they have to take you on a little journey. so we'll be finely carving the sound until it tells a little story to you.

i've also been digging through the list of new onlyone tunes that are in development. pick this one up and run with it for awhile. get stuck. what's this one about? hmmm... pick it up, run a bit... get stuck... and so on. one thing i'm finding about the new tunes is that they're sonically a lot more complex, what with the new synths i'm exploring. but this complexity is also making the process take longer. where a few years ago i might've been more improvisational and quick-moving, i'm finding now i'm a little more deliberate and inclined to take my time.

well, maybe 'inclined' isn't the right word. my inclination is often to work quickly and fly through it. but i guess my head is keeping my heart back a little, saying "okay, that's awesome, but we have to make sure to get it right so everything works." i never have demos, really, and now i'm thinking in terms of that in my own way. get a song a pretty good way along and then say "okay, so that's the tune. now let's deconstruct it completely and rebuild along the same framework."

anyway, that stuff is moving along nicely, if not as quickly as i would like. i'm thinking an EP will probably be ready by march or april. probably more ambient works this year, too. plus Funf, the Kirkdorffer/ Kowalski collaboration and Larry Banilow work. it's a good time for studio stuff. plus the possibility that i'll be producing some Troy Kidwell (Fluttr Effect guitarist/ songwriter)! that'll be great fun.

speaking of Fluttr Effect, there was a big fire at Troy and Vessella's place just before the new year. well, it was at the Pan 9 building, and it rendered homeless many, and many of those people lost a great deal of their possessions and work on top of their home. very scary. lexi and i went on saturday evening to a little get-together to help out, and we brought a couple of bags of our old clothes in the hopes that people will be able to use some of it.

can you imagine losing absolutely everything? fire is scary. really scary.