Forgot to mention

I forgot to blog about the artist who attended the Palais concerts. He was at all the performances on Saturday evening at the 1078 Gallery, and he spent the whole time creating these intricate free-hand pen-and-ink drawings on torn up pieces of cardboard. He would give them to musicians and audience members.

I can't read his signature very well but it looks like "John M..." The drawings are very beautiful and seem to focus on mountains and evergreens drawn different ways. I have three of them. My favorite is, of course, the one he drew during Lucio's and my performance. He entitled it, "Action of Breath and Voice".

Music is life, and life music

This is the first chance I've had to blog about the Palais Ideal event in Chico this past weekend. As Phillip G pointed out, it was kind of like a retreat for the SF Bay Area new music community. There were quite a few of us there and it was just far away enough to feel like we were out of town. I love changes of scenery.

Phillip & I had an uneventful drive up on Saturday but a bit of a struggle with web-based directions once we hit town. Once there everything went smoothly from my perspective. There were people in attendance at every set I saw. I got to hear Marielle Jakobsen's solo work for the first time, which was a treat. It's very tasteful, and thoughtful, and a lot more complicated than perhaps it looks. Phillip's solo performance proved to me that even when he is exhausted, he is still himself, and still owns the venue. Danny Cohen's singer/songwriter set was a lot of fun too, when evening came. It was very dark and evocative, with song titles like "Rigor Mortis on the Ridge".

Austin Space made the trip up from the Bay Area, armed with a weekend pass and collecting CDs from many musicians for the KFJC library. He also came armed with an impressive recording rig and recorded a lucky few of us -- myself and Lucio included, I'm proud to say.

Lucio didn't arrive until Saturday evening, since he had a gig at the looping festival in Santa Cruz that afternoon. He came blazing up the highway and arrived ready to rock.

It was funny -- I must have been giving off a very "Where's Lucio?" vibe because folks kept coming up to me and letting me know whether or not they had seen him. (Austin picked up on this and asked me, "What does Lucio look like?" so he could get in on the Lucio watch.) When he ultimately did arrive, three different people ran up to me to inform me excitedly, "Lucio's here!" I got excited too and ran off to find him.

Our set went pretty well with a really on-the-ball sound engineer named Steve making sure the words could be heard above the instrumentalism.

There was just a lot of positive energy in the event. Organizer Jason Cassidy, who had every right to be stressed out, was nothing but mellow and positive every time I spoke to him, even though he was dealing with headliner cancellations and all kinds of stuff I don't envy. There were lots of volunteers around and audience members who were not all members of the bands. I'm hoping the Palais will become an annual event. I'd do it again in a second.

Next up for me is the San Francisco night of the Duck & Cover tomorrow, and then the Flip Quartet meeting/rehearsal on Saturday and then the Flip itself, on November 2nd. More collaborating with Lucio, which is always good.

On this day in history...

Happy birthday to you,
happy birthday to you,
happy birthday, dear K...
(tall, artistic, literary, and culinary...the sweetest confection in Portland, and not a Moonstruck chocolate!)
happy birthday to you!

And many MORE...:)

The latest

Lucio is back from Europe. I went to hear him at the Illuminated Corridor event last Friday night. I thought it was too bad it was so overcast in Oakland. It would have been glorious to see the full moon shining down on the crowd and the artists, but I understand overcast is how Suki wanted it, so I guess I should defer to the organizer. Among many other swell performance installations, Daniel Popsicle played a new soundtrack to "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" which was projected on the side of a white van on the blocked-off street.

I met up with Lucio again a couple of days later so I could drop off a CD of the vocal parts for "Mansions of the Moon". The parts are spoken, whispered, sung, and manipulated in Digital Performer. The idea of the piece is that the utterance of such ancient words will attract spirits, so the proliferation of vocal parts represents those spirits. Lucio & I sonically represent the magic itself. We have rehearsals set up to get the piece ready for the show on October 21st.

Lucio is also going to be part of The Flip Quartet premiering on November 2nd. The four improvisers and I will be getting together for lunch to go over the piece and make plans for how it's going to go. I expect the four three-minute timers to arrive any day now...I ordered them online and I got a shipping notification.

"The Breeze" now uploaded

My flute quartet, Remove Before Flight, was performed on August 26th at the West Marin Music Festival. There's a recording of the first movement, "The Breeze", now uploaded to my MySpace. Go have a listen...it's at the bottom of the list of songs.

Mansions of the Moon

Lucio Menegon and I are preparing a duo project for the Palais Ideal festival in Chico. It's starting to come together.

I've chosen the text, which is an English translation of the Mansions of the Moon from the Picatrix, an 11-century grimoire. This text is also called Ghayat al Hakim, or "The Aim of the Wise". It was first written down in Arabic, and then translated into Latin in 1256 for Alfonso the Wise of Castille.

The Mansions of the Moon is meant to teach the different stations the moon will go through as it travels through the zodiac. The grimoire tells you what kind of spells you should do when the moon is in each mansion. There are 28 mansions, and an introductory and conclusionary paragraph.

This weekend I recorded myself speaking all the text. Next I'll edit the spoken sections in Digital Performer and try to fit them all into 30 minutes, which is length of the set Lucio and I have at the Palais Ideal. I'm also going to record them again whispered and maybe sung, depending on how the editing goes. When I'm done I'll have something Lucio and I can improvise over on flute, bass flute, and guitar.

The show is on October 21st. Lucio is in Europe right now but he'll be back in the Bay Area by October 6th, since he's in the Illuminated Corridor show at 21 Grand. Sometime between then and the 21st, we'll get together and figure out how to musically accompany all that astrological magic.