Minutes

Little slap taps - looking to emulate my hero Michael Hedges on my SG after an intense Reiki session, during which it's put out there that I may be communicating with my recently deceased uncle and my long departed cousin. Link to the post.

"Midnght Osteria" the notebook says. Soon it will be Morel time - we just found our first one of the year in Olalla. Link to the post.

Working title in the notebook is "Deep Time in the Stink Factory", which I kind of like. This evokes the middle of Stalker, where Professor, Writer and Stalker are headed out to the zone on the weird train / car. A day of processing worst-case scenarios for me, for sure. Link to the post.

This little line is stuck in my head since jams with Neil and Jason the other night. I was exhausted from job stress, Neil was sick and Jason was yawning too, but we got some things down like we always do. It takes a few tries but I work it out by number 3 or 4. Link to the post.

So grateful for my friends! A demo in progress with Jason at the helm - I'm really digging how his production is coming together. This is the kind of vocal I will just sing to myself while I'm working or running or biking or cooking or something–now I have a project to channel that into. A napkin with more potential rhymes for this one. Link to the post.

A snip of acoustic played through my Circular4Track software, before I'd completely cleaned up the glitching of the slider. There was a nice jaggedness that comes from these glitches that you shoudl try to get back to. I kind of took the edge off in this latest iteration. This sign greeted Jason and I in a parking lot in the U District this week and it cracked us up. Link to the post.

This is the ancestor of the full blown Guitar Cult Land Bridge Approach, a short piece with a guitar line against a longer melismatic vocal, from my band Tuktu originally. This was fun to try to play, march according to the dotted-quarter-note-pulse and sing all at once. Here's the chart as written in my notebook many years ago. A big day of job change for me - scarytown! But what doesn't...

I'm aniticapting I'll be processing a bunch tomorrow, so here's a pre-emptive strike from 4/17, anticipating Oneohtrix' set tonight. Pic: live view of my office. Link to the post.

Short one today. I made this little study for the op-1, so I could learn how to do these polyrhythms and get a god texture. A good god texture. It's more sound cloud than I thought it would be - the last bit really works. I made the quintuplets by upping the varispeed and playing with the Endless sequencer, but forgot about correcting the pitch, so listen to the rhythms, not the pitches. Every...

Slowly but surely I am getting comforable jamming in real time with the machines. This is my half a jam at Jason's last night. I found myself in an entirely different headspace laying things on a grid, listening and reacting, shaping and mixing, than I do as a player, but not unlike where my head is at as a composer on a page or as an improviser doing anything leader-y - anything to steer the...

When you stop to think about how much you stop and think about MONEY, you may shrug like I am today. Chasing dollars. I love Alejandro Jodorowsky. In Jodowsky's Dune, he says, holding up some bills: The picture need to be exactly as I am dreaming the picture. Is a dream. Don't change my dream. This system make of us slaves. Without dignity. Without depth. With a devil in our pocket. [He ho...

Continuing with my uplifting series on stoicism and societal decay.. I've been talking to Jason this weekend about lyrics, how we write them, when they work. This is one of mine that works - worked at the time, and it came out spotaneously when I was driving from from work - I pulled over and out came words into my recorder like kool aid from a pitcher. I've been stuck in the middle, won&#...

On 99 is another Viaduct-linspried thing. I didn't know I had two. The chorus is the keeper - the vocal is about some parent telling their child about the times before the bombs hit. I wrote it when Iraq was the target, now there could be multiple inspriations - Ukraine, Gaza, and today the sole casualty of the Iranian attack on Israel. Where is this headed? Systems crash at night - the though...

"Tunnel" started out as a soundtrack for a car cruising the Alaskan Viaduct in Seattle. This originally sprung from the gentleman's songwriting club / band I had with David Russell, Sean Bates and Robert Walker called C'mon C'mon, and was one of many that were deemed "not right" for that band, but still pops up in my head frequently. I like the bass...

This one was called "Ice, Whole" (Clever!), an instrumental I made with my old friend Matt Wainwright under the name Gamma Male. This sound here - this slow downward glide with the pitch wheel on the Juno 6 - always evokes the tundra for me, I think because of Mark Isham's music in Never Cry Wolf - a hugely influential movie for me. For most of my life I've been coveting...

Can't remember where this sketch was, but it evoked a trudge across the tundra to me and was one of the first things to inspire me to write the Tuktu material. I remember going nuts from too much office work downtown and went to the music floor of the library downtown - the kick ass Rem Koolhaus building we have in Seattle. There was a practice room with piano which I could lock myself in for...

Stereolab on the brain, a little sketch from 4 years ago I've been calling "Stereo Style" in my notebooks. The out-of-tune piano is the last gasp of my upright before I gave it to a happy person via Craigslist free. Went to Sten and Nete's last night for a long overdue catchup, and I snapped this picture of a guitar of his I've been coveting for a long time, a Hikari...

A complicated warmup turned into something simpler. A wise man told me recently that if I wanted to reach more people, swath my weird bits in accessible clothing. Well not those exact words but that was the sentiment. I love playing these slides and it feels good to at least have 4 more bars in the notebook. Moving these through positions and key changes is the next step. Link to the post.

Another stream of consciousness exercise made into a piece. I wrote this out - one of three studies - in Boonville without the aid of an instrument, on November 3, 2006. These three pieces were a Satori for me, a moment of awakening, where I hadn't trusted my self to freely write. This line has 2 others, as well as drum, in this sketch for a short-lived group I was planning with Seth and Barre...

It's been so busy with the house that I haven't practiced or written much this past week, though I did post one thing last week that Jason turned into this. Sweet beginnings to another hit. I can't place the vibes of the mallet percussion here but man is it familiar. Link to the post.

This weekend's biophony: three selections from 10 hours of recording. It was a quiet night, though there is the first instance of some mechanical buzzing I hadn't heard - insect or just something nearby buzzing? Last night we heard a scrap between two animals - not sure what but I'm glad I wasn't outside next to them, though they could be cats I would expect to hear more low rowrin...

I forgot I'd made this drum track to practice this study with. It's called Shifts, and if you notices the lines in the notation, you'll see why. I can barely play it at this tempo. 5 days without guitar practice time today, so I'm pining for my studies. Next week promises some relief. Link to the post.

Insomnia take two. I tried to capture some of my state of mind in sound when I wrote this piece for orchestra called Bizzy Bizzy. In this section, I'm trying to evoke a hypnagogic image I had listening to the radio as I fell asleep. I gave each member of the group a section of text quoting Terrence McKenna on Art Bell's radio show, and asked them to read it aloud in an even, conversational...

Big insomnia night last night as I ran inventory - aka monkey-minded - about all the things I think I must do. The chores required of us before we can move. The music I want to write but don't have time write now. On and on obsessive demons gnaw at my stomach until I can put thoughts to bed, usually with the aid of comedians in earbuds and 2 benadryl. Last night it didn't work, but Lenny B...

I found a longer recording of 15190, which I mentioned yesterday - there were actually two drone / loop pieces lasting about 5 minutes each. I pulled the other piece into today's minute, as well as some other sounds found through shortwave: me 'playing' the sideband tuner on my Sony 7600GR, and one of the first recordings I made with the Jowita shortwave I bought in 2000 when the Degen...