Minutes

More Racine collage. First day back, I feel so reset and excited about digging into the archive project John and I schemed while in Racine. I really want o make this happen, and have my toes dipping in so many pools right now, my mind is on balancing the energizing music projects on the horizon with our energizing nesting going on in Olalla. Like... this shed that Mike, Tim, Julie, Leesa and Anna...

Is it already time to go home??? Here's one of 20 pics of me with this Dyer. The last night before I left Racine, I pulled out a radio and did some tape pause compositions. Racine is just an hour north of Chicago on Lake Michigan, and I pulled in some nice things to cut up. This cut-up technique yields some really nice byproducts to my ear, like the guitar and bassline I'm trying to sift f...

Every day we start with some incredible coffee from John's La Pavoni, and continue talking music until 12 or 1 am. I am smiling ear-to-ear in most of the pictures I took, here I was trying to look 'serious'. More harp guitar noodles here. I want one badly now. My brain is starting to wrap itself around the bass tuning and drive lines upward. I wrote in my notebook that it extended my r...

At last I've got some in-person time with my mentor Sir John Stropes. Racine is like Edmonds, the town I grew up in, but flat and more racially diverse. With my mom recovering from her fall and the election, this is such a mental break for me. In real life it's 11/18 and I'm catching up on so many posts I've been saving up. I woke up early (5:30 Seattl time!) to play this beauty -...

I'm on a plane to Milwaukee to visit John, catching up on the minutes, and big time turbulence is hitting right while I type this. I think we're about to take a big dip. Anyways - he won. I'm going to keep trying to find common ground with my fellow humans, though it seems like a daunting task right now. Link to the post.

Day after. I noodled this in Ableton's Note app on the phone, which I've barely played with. Too sapped to do much else. Link to the post.

The big day. We're having everyone over to either celebrate or commiserate. Ella got ahold of the EP-133 and made this masterpiece. Link to the post.

A collage of an acoustic idea "acoustic snaps on harms, morning music". Thrown on a grid in Ableton - from November 4th 2018. Link to the post.

Another lost Covid artifact - my section of the Wig Out Projectg's Covid album. Got an invite from Dave Foley to make a minute of sound for this fun recording - forgot about this one. Link to the post.

The election anxiety is cranking up, mom is still in the ER waiting for a full prognosis, but it's looking like a fractured pelvis that will just take a little time to heal. Patience. Party tonight at Bobby and Ryan's awesome place. Deep in the Covid time back in 2020, I started writing this idea for trio called Mists, then left it behind to write Lnad Bridge Approach. Let's come back...

Sometimes you get to feeling down, unfed, ungrounded as a musician. You gotta remember this recording from November 1, 2017. You had just started doing Reiki and Acupuncture combined, and had a very out-of-body experience at the session, then went to your space, plugged in, and improvised this. It turned into your piece Skips, pretty much as originally played. This is you in touch with the other,...

Halloween - mom fell and we were in the ER with her all day. Here's Leesa, 6-year-old Dalila and me playing Dalila's "Green Song" on Halloween, 2014. Link to the post.

From Tuktu's first show at the Skylark April 2012. I don't have enough recordings with Joshua playing guitar, and these have good energy. Maybe we go back and do a little surgery on these for a release? I dig everyone's playing, and the elaborate backups. Channeling some Meat Puppets here. Link to the post.

Kurt's bday - celebrated with Halloween pub quiz in Tacoma at Dusty's Hideaway. That's my sister and I, in a costume provided by our friendly pub quiz neighbor. Really missing my jams, and missing playing this tune with the mighty Tuktu. Link to the post.

The phone is a great tool if you can keep the distractions at bay. I've been carrying it around as a dictaphone and cataloguing my voice notes meticulously for years. I was using a very primitive app called 'recorder' that worked quickly, but it is no longer supported on the latest os, so I went shopping. I made a lot of little beatboxing recordings to test them. Link to the post.

Tonight a got a little obsessed with this exercise. More fun playing this with a beat instead of metronome. Link to the post.

Note to self - derived this from the exercise I post tomorrow. Link to the post.

I went deep into reorganizing my library of sounds, journals, demo snips etc, into one uniform naming convention including the date the thing was recorded. It's made my library much more usable and, from a journaling standpoint, more interesting to surf. I follow a convention where I start any filename with a date formatted YYYY.MM.DD..wav, which I think I got from my old cohort Scott Colburn....

As summer fades to fall and our move to Olalla starts to solidify, I find I'm managing my time in weeks instead of days. I have a background thread of music running constantly, but time in the "studio" I've built over here is second to my trying to keep my guitar chops fresh (1-2 hours/day) which is also second, of course, to getting our house set up. I'm updating the...

Covid returned today and I slept 4 hours this afternoon. Whoa. Another 30 year old recording from this old tape I mentioned yesterday. Link to the post.

Found this 25 year old 4 track recording today - maybe 30 years old? Link to the post.

Something going on here with the bass line. We've been quoting Jimi Hendrix alot lately from Foxey Lady: "Here I come baby, I'm comin to GITcha!", at funtimes. We have an apple tree now, and I love to pick apples, so whenever I walk up to the apple tree, I say out loud, "here I come apples, I'm comin to GITcha!" That kind of thing. These are the joke...

Damn I am glad I took the time to learn how to export these. I spent a chunk of time tonight learning how to get these EP133 bits cleanly into Ableton - thank you Son Wu for your tutorial. I love the basslines I make on this thing, and can't replicate it in Ableton yet.. or on anything else. Lots of bookkeeping today after an angsty night, feeling like I've left my composer-self behind, ad...

Slow honeyman. Link to the post.

Sam's birthday today - tonight we celebrate after being holed up with Covid for two weeks. This feels suitably Argento for a fall night. I'm getting the hang of exporting projects from the ep133. Link to the post.