“Erroneous Bosch” started out as noodling, grew into a theme, and then spent around 8 months in the “fiddly” stage. I even gave up on it for a while and woulda likely forgotten it had my wife not said: “that’s good, why aren’t you working on that?”
I sat down to record an acoustic track – with vocals no less – but wanted to warm up my fingers with some improv first. That’s when the rhythm to “Peace Bus” appeared.
No, “The Sand Bats of Manark IV” (3:27) is not a long lost ST:TOS episode but the next installment of my ongoing “CAE – Curiosities from the Attic” recording project.
I’ve been getting back into guitaring, as I like to say, and this has gotten me back into … looking back at things which have sprung before, unbidden from the instruments I torture.
Steamy Creamy Beanness is a musical idea I’d almost forgotten about – a bit of doggerel, a knock off – but I rather like this short edit of my initial concept combined with this silly, time-lapse video, here. Doop-de-doo … what else lies in these vaults, I wonder
Once again, please forgive the sound quality (much less the hamhanded playing) – this is recorded live onto boombox sometime in 2002.
It’s November, 2007 and at my suggestion, my 12 year-old daughter, Mel, is busy shoving wads of toilet paper into her ear canals.
It’s her first rock concert, you see, and we’ve already walked 20+ blocks from the ferry terminal in downtown Seattle to a place called “Neumos” and here I went and forgot the earplugs.
I’ve really been enjoying my record collection now that I have a new turntable (a Pro-Ject Debut Carbon – incredible value for the price) and, from time to time, have encountered a few aspects of listening to rekkids that you just don’t get with any other medium – especially with the now ubiquitous digital files!
In early spring of this year, I returned to my hometown for a short visit with family and friends. During the visit, I managed to collect two recordings of my youth, one of which is the first, full-length, pop-music album I ever purchased: Blondie’s “Parallel Lines.”
In early spring of this year, I returned to my hometown for a short visit with family and friends. During the visit, I managed to collect two recordings of my youth, one of which is the album I can pinpoint as having been instrumental (*snicker*) in awakening my interest in sound.
The last few months have seen my return to music creation at the cost of much else in my life. I remain obsessed with regaining – and then hopefully surpassing – all past musical endeavors and, as such, have spent much time in pouring through the audio diary I’ve kept (more off than on these last five years) since 1991.
Thinking quite correctly that the better bits would be at the end rather than the beginning, I started transferring the most recent tapes to digital and sifting through the resulting tracks for nuggets with which to kick start the practice and aim of my renewed passion.
Back before you could steal music from the internet, you actually had to go to the effort to drive all of the way into town to shoplift it from a store. And if you were into vinyl, it was a bitch to get that shit under your shirt without anyone noticing.
Oh, record stores, how I miss your once, near ubiquity.
I stumbled across “MODULAR: Sonic Explorations” while hunting for an Eyvind Kang track on YouTube. Situations such as this make me reflect that, while I miss record stores terribly, dammit, I love the internet.
When I first heard about Yoshida Tatsuya’s “Ruins Alone,” a solo version of the band by its composer and drummer, I have to admit I was dubious. I guess I was expecting something along the lines of John French’s “O Solo Drumbo” – essentially Captain Beefheart songs stripped down to the drums. Interesting but … not necessarily something I listen to very often.
Ruins is primarily known as a Japanese drum and bass unit, cranking out heavy, hard to categorize, start and stop on a dime, jazz/prog/avant-garde music fit for weirdoids like myself.
I fell in love with music very early on in life but, as with the visual arts, never really caught the bug to create any myself until well past said age.
In 1989, I began work as a security guard and there met Bruce Norton, an amateur blues guitarist. In casual conversation with him, I voiced the guitar-playing pipe-dream most young men of our culture have and he assured me that the dream could be realized. In short order, he sold me a guitar and showed me a few tips and tricks.
Brian Eno, in collaboration with poet Rick Holland, released a new album called “Drums Between The Bells” this 4th of July, giving me more than one reason to revel in noise.
Diverse in scope, “Drums Between The Bells” features numerous approaches to the sound poem, a form Eno has been experimenting with since the release of “Dead Finks Don’t Talk” on his first solo album “Here Come the Warm Jets,” in 1973.