shelton ajemian tanaka rodan 11-25-2004

thanksgiving 2004 - we got a little snow here in chicago the day before, so it was a nice wintry start to the holiday season. i'd rather it snow than rain when it's 32 degrees outside....
i had a good dinner at johnathan, giselle and brandy's place on milwaukee avenue - had my fair share of food and wine, hung out for a bit and then headed up the street to rodan to play with jason ajemian and nori tanaka. we hadn't played as a trio before, so it was a good time to do some playing. we played two sets that had no breaks in between the songs - which is a challenge - if you feel like the music is headed somewhere you don't want to go, you can't just simply stop and start anew. you have to figure a way to slowly change the music and move it into a new direction. we went from repetitive drone-type musings to section swith nori and jason clearly defined as the rhythm section and me blowing over the top. i enjoy playing solos over a rhythm section, but always feel that i want to be truly part of the group. finding a way to make what i do both soloistic and ensemble orientated at the same time is always a challenge - sometimes with more success than other times. obviously.. we played late and finished the night - it was good to play with those guys.

second citizens hideout 11-22-2004

So the second citizens returned to the hideout to play our last monday night there. We thought that we were done with the mondays with the close of October and hadn't shown up two weeks ago, but got a message saying "where were you guys" from our guy Ryan Hembrey who helped us out in booking the shows....a bit of a mis-call. The good thing about not playing on mondays anymore is that we are going to get a wednesday night show there in december - it is a better night and i'm looking forward to it.
Fred was not in town for this night, and Frank had other engagements, so the group was me, Keefe, Josh & Anton with Mike Reed sitting in on the drums. We had a good time playing - I think we've played the music so much now that we can do alot of things to the music very comfortably. Dave Rempis and Tim Daisy played a duo set up front - they play very well together - Dave sounds great on the baritone saxophone.

solo laptop then duo AC 11-21-2004

i was asked to make some music at an installment of vadim sprikut's house series called AC. i've been working on a piece for 2 clarinets, bass clarinet and piano and computer; so decided to try it out at this concert. i've been working on the piece for about a week now; i've recorded in all the parts to protools and made a patch in MSP to work with the audio - rearranging the parts and attempting to turn it into something else. i feel there are alot of possibilities to explore, but this all takes time. i had some success earlier in the week, but felt like i kind of hurried myself along at the performance - which isn't all that unexpected i suppose. it was a good environment to work on the piece - i need to experiment more with the piece and write things down which work better in order to finalize it as a composition.
brian labycz also performed - he first did a kind of tape piece - though it was on a computer. we all listened to the piece through headphones, which was especially nice as brian used the possibilities of the spatial environemtn to good effect. he used what soudned like field recordings - but indoor ones. at one point vadim had to go answer the door - i almost thought that brian had pre-recorded such an encounter and put it into the piece - but i was wrong.
we played together after our solo pieces - we both worked with samples - and i think brian was taking a feed from me, which was a bit tricky to deal with - i felt the need to stay ahead of him so we wouldn't be working with the same material too much. it was a good challenge and a good night.

grey ghost iowa city 11-13-2004

so johnathan and i headed out west for one night - a saturday night. it wasn't our firt trip to iowa city - we played there a few years ago when we had first started playing together as grey ghost - johnathan went to school out there and knows plenty of folk - it's kind of funny as we walk through the streets because he sees people he knows driving by cars or going into a bar - and it's never a huge deal that they haven't seen each other in awhile, it's just kind of like he'd been gone a week or so. we played at a place called the glass lodge which had a killer ceiling:



the glass lodge makes it money selling glass pipes, they make their own pipes, so they have very few costs, and instead of having a real dorky looking headshop with tye-dye and other hippie shit, they keep most of the room open to hang artwork and have crafts made by local artists - it's a good place i'd say. the funy thing to happen early on was the big guy with a shaved head who came in wearing a duster and started asking about if any of us knew anybody that he could smoke with - huh? was he the most dim-witted undercover cop of all time? or can someone really be so desperate......

so, to the music - the night was a gallery opening as well as a show - so the place was filled up for all the music - some friend's of johnthan's played - tim who sang & played guitar, his guitars had some nice attachments on them which made interesting feedback style sounds; ed gray played with johnathan and this guy peter sat in on a wild saxophone solo for the last song whil keeping his young son on his shoulder (i'll have a picture up soon) - never thought i'd see a sax solo with a kid in tow.... we played a short set that went well - got alot of good compliments afterwards.... the show was over by ten, so we went out after dropping our equipment off at tim's place. first by this place gabe's, where a terrible band played - i had to leave, so headed to the sanctuary, a bar where they have the jazz music, to see anton hatwich, frank rosaly and nate lepine play - a nice coincidence that they were in town the same night.

so a good night in iowa city - and another grey ghost sighting....

flockterkit 3030 11-11-2004

another quiet night at the 3030. flockterkit had booked this date awhile ago, and i really though that by this time we would have had plenty of time to get together to rehearse, but unfortunately with everyone being busy we didn't. so we played a set without running through any of the written material. the thing is - the pieces aren't all that difficult, and we do alot of improvising, but a lack of rehearsal is always missed. and whenever mistakes happen within the pieces, it automatically triggers in the brain - we should have practiced. i also didn't feel like we had much of a communication going on in our improvisation - which really has more influence over whether the music works or not. if mistakes are made and you improvise well around it, then that pulls the whole night into the good column. (i'm not trying to be dark about it, just honest) nights like these make me want to have less performances and more time to just get together with the musicians. some might say, "well, it's basically a rehearsal", but it's really not - in a rehearsal if a mistake is made you can stop, work on the part & correct it. in front of people, you've got to just plow through the material. something not worked on in rehearsal enough is actually going through an entire piece, and so people will say, at least you got to go through the whole piece, and i somewhat agree...but in an ideal situation the rehearsal would provide for most major mistakes being weeded out and letting everyone think about the music being made at the time of rehearsal, and not be subject to mental mistakes.....an exciting entry here, right? i think i need to start a party blog....

speaking of getting together with other musicians, last night i got together with toby summerfield and jamie levinson for the second time. i think it will be fun to keep playing with them - jamie's good with the drums, i'm concentrating more on computer, using synthesizers and doing effects. this winter is the time to work consistently on groups that are collaborative - but also hopefully getting recordings together of compositions.....

vibraphone meets Max/MSP 11-7-2004

A return to the Hungry Brain for me after the Phrenology Festival a few weeks ago. This night was devoted to duets, and I was asked to bring one. I did a computer / vibraphone duet with jason adasiewicz. He improvised, I used him as a sound source for improvising, which he could then react to to continue th improvising. The largest challenge a computer based (especially sampling based - synthesis is different) improviser has when playing with "real" instruments, is that the live instruments can switch up what they're doing so very quickly. Unless you have a good interface set up for using your computer, it tends to be very loop based, and slow changing. I think I had a pretty good interface last night and was pretty active in terms of being able to move from one part to another, but there's more work to be done. I liked our setup - jason played on the stage and i sat in front, facing the stage so i could hear the mix of the vibraphone and the speakers which were outputting my sound. I was happy with the performance - instruments with clean sounds are best for manipulating, as when you do something to the sound, it actually makes it sound like a completely different thing. And the vibraphone has a great clean sound.

The other duets of the night were kevin davis on cello, electronics & radio with jake elliott on computer - which was good, but short - they did a drone piece, and then were done - james falzone witha drummer from boston, johnathan crawford with steve hess doing a solid drum duet, it made me think more about how i would really like to be in a band with two drummers. a nice night at the brain, but kind of a slow one, not too many folk, but still smoky....

no music only election bulls**t 11-3-2004

ah, so it has come to this. i definitely do not feel good about the "results" of yesterdays general election determining if or not W would be able to push the rightwing agenda for another 4 years. but the american people have "spoken" and have decided that:

it's ok that there wasn't any threat from Iraq.
it's allright to fight to protect those sacred oilfields.
it's ok that our leader is an incompetent, poorly tongued faker who is from new hampshire but puts his ranch in texas on his sleeve.
it's allright that the companies that the rpesident's friends & family work for are benefitting greatly from no bid contracts
it's ok that the christian conservative movement is hijacking the representative democracy
it's allright to be a divider, not a uniter

there's so much more that i'm not thinking clearly enough to put into words.....

as David Corn from the Nation says "there will be no good-bye to reckless preemptive war, an economic policy based on tax breaks tilted toward the wealthy, a war on environmental regulations, a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, excessive secrecy in government, unilateral machismo, the neocon theology of hubris and arrogance, a ban on effective stem cell research, no-bid Halliburton contracts, John Ashcroft, Donald Rumsfeld, and much more. Did I mention Dick Cheney?"

So what now? I have no idea. I had trouble sleeping last night. Jen & I stayed up for awhile wathching the returns come in after making some good stir fry with a sweet & sour & spicy sauce; i was getting optimistic for a bit there especially after pennsylvania went kerry's way - but florida seemed to fall to easy & then the ohio numbers started leaning bush's way. i turned off the tv right after peter jennings said, we're going to put ohio in the bush column. i knew i wasn't ready for bed - but also knew that continuing to watch wouldn't get anything done. that was the worst thing - feeling utterly powerless about something which has the power to affect my daily mood for a long time to come. it would be nice to be able to block out politics, but the bush gang are so opposite to my convictions on almost every issue that it just angers me to hear their voices or see their faces and expressions - their superiority complex is amazing - that's why they won this election - their smugness rubs off on the obvious majority of this nation who are undereducated, live sheltered lives and pampered in an american way of life whose greates hardship is a car break down or a bad haircut.

it really boils down to the fact that there are so many people in this coutnry that get spoon fed from the time they are born on a steady diet of consumerism, sensationalism, sports, and the great faith that american's, no matter what they do, how many people they kill, no matter how much oil they suck up, no matter how much nepotism, cronyism & racism is shown to be present in our society - we're still the best country in the world and our people are the most moral & best.

but thankfully, about 52 million other people hate george w like i do. well, maybe not hate him, but don't like him or his policies.

maybe another 4 years of this guys is best for the country - i've felt for a long time that's it's got to get a lot worse before it can get better - things are just too easy in this country - people forget how many things there are in this coutnry that are taken for granted.

someone said to me a few days ago - the best thing about w winning again is that he'd have to clean up his own messes. well, he pobably won't clean them up, but at least he won't be able to push off the blame.