Posted on July 17, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Posted on June 29, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (17)
One of the earliest songs we wrote, immersion composition society-stylee, was a song called Moneymaker at the 5-minute behest of Erik Ehn. It was supposed to be a successful song that would stand for Tyrone's line in Long Day's Journey Into Night:
CHORUS
That God-damned play
I bought for a song
And made such a great success in ā
A great money success ā
It ruined me with its promise
Of an easy fortune.
By the time I woke it was too late.
Iād lost the talent I once had
Through years of repetition.TYRONE
Thirty-five to forty thousand dollars net profit a season like snapping your fingers!
We recorded it into a cellphone in front of NohSpace, using the entire cast of the Cycle Plays as white-robed Causey Way chorus, then four-tracked it at House of Zoka, complete with my cracking voice, which producer A4 thought communicated the right sentiment. It took everything I had not to tear off into the Mary Tyler Moore Show theme song each time we laid down another vocal track.
I do so hate that song Moneymaker. It encapsulated all the confusing things about the craft of music making on demand, It's pouring out of you like gold, or emesis. It's completely (not) within reach. It's either brilliant, which makes a repeat performance impossible, or shite, which means you have to try again. Hum a few bars and I descend into deep depression. Lexa Walsh found it again in another song in Letters from a Small House and started to sing a mash-up of Mary Tyler Moore Show Theme with Joni Mitchell's Both Sides Now and I quietly went beserk.
No one in The Cycle Plays project cares about that, though. They sing the Moneymaker song as they wash cups, or pick up fans, or gather around the musicians for a vocal rehearsal of the one hundred new songs we've written for them since that one fateful song (which never even made it into a play).
So Erik, ending a three-year creative process as it was begun, deposited a piece of binder paper on each of our rigs with the request for a new song by the afternoon. We missed the deadline but caught up by lunch the following day. Five minutes later, Llu exposed us by singing Senses Working Overtime as he walked by. At least he was finally off of Moneymaker. I grabbed Jonathan Segel by the ankle, despite his attempts to be completely invisible during this process, and asked him to redeem this song. He did. And then Saturday night we grabbed John Oglevee by the ankle in a similar fashion, concatenated these two versions so we were not working overtime, but were ascending at the end, which is all you can do when your name is I love you. Llu was in the audience singing Moneymaker over the top of this new, final, closing song. Llu, I asked, stopping all activity. Did we just write Moneymaker again? He gently affirmed we had.
Posted on June 25, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Posted on June 25, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Posted on June 25, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (3)
in an empirical sense, that is. I mean, does it? I have all the time in the world (too much, in fact) while ringing a tiny bell as Lluis enters the perfromance area oh so slowly and my arm starts to hurt. but this thick rehearsal period is flying by. this is the way to live, but just when it becomes enjoyable it dissapears...
Posted on June 23, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Things are going along at a great pace. Just the other day Dan Plonsey (amazing) gathered together a group at House of Zoka to work out the pieces for play #4 "Long Day's Journey Into Night." Here's what it looked like... Also: let's face it....performance is a mere one month away. There'll be no more nappin!
Posted on June 08, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0)
yeah, well we lost one of our Yugen Orchestra members recently because they got a better offer. professionally speaking I totally understand (money, fame, big audiences!!!) but still feel frustrated. and not by any feeling of inability on our part to do our job. mostly because extra logistical issues I do not need. (Look how hard we're working, Ma!) but it's gonna be okay. better even...yeah, that's petty, sure, but I'm a human - Aaaa
Posted on April 04, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0)
As if the xmas retail convulsion had not occurred, we leapt into the January, 2007, rehearsal residency at NOHspace, rehearsing a play a day and, in some cases found satisfaction. We're asking a lot of ourselves, creating a day-long piece of five-plus parts using an almost democratic method. Luckily there is a (benign) dictator, a person with veto power. It's possible that, with the advent of 2007, our crew is beginning to feel the looming likelihood of the actual event, as opposed to dreamy trips to various locales and making stuff up for some unquantifiable date in the distant future. That time is sooner than we think. Picture: Moe observes during rehearsal, ready at a moment's notice to use an implement.
Posted on January 11, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0)
In late November and December of 2006 we spent some carefully carved-out time working up new songs and rearranging older songs in preparation for the looming rehearsal residency in January of 2007. But like the reluctant or simply forgetful partner we left plenty of our work til the night before, the last minute and, in some cases, the morning of. But not these two. Dan Plonsey and Jubilith Moore, prepared, engaged and on time at House of Zoka, revealed abilities beyond their resume. At one point Dan was playing a tone poem on the piano while Jubilith treated portions of the text as a torch song. And it was very good.
Posted on January 11, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Post-Tokyo through to the January '07 reheasal residency at NOHspace finds the musicians gleaning an hour or three here and there amidst a holiday fervor, creating new songs, modifying existing songs and experimenting with sounds. This past Sunday found Liz A. (resplendant in orange and what is she holding in her hand?) and Jason S. (dangerously close to a recently played Balypso), with a heap of stuff, at House of Zoka. Together with Jonathan S. we tried some new ideas, recorded them and intend to multi-track some as standalone songs. Maybe that's the name of a single CD release encapsulating the whole work through a quasi-pop lens. YugenOrchestra's "Standalone Songs." It has a nice ring to it.
Posted on December 12, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)
in which there are about five weeks before a week long SF-based rehearsal residency at NOHspace and we have so very much to do...
now that the musicians have matched themselves to the individual plays, now that they have the most recent scripts, the most recent run-through audio and are aware of what still needs to be done there comes to light (here on the doorstep of the 2006-2007 holiday retail convulsion) that dawning sense of...dread? desperation? or is it really that big of a deal? Is the actual creation of the music really that problematic? or, let's face it...isn't it actually the logistical arrangements, information dispersal protocols and basic semantic near-misses that are the real challenge?
songs are songs. scheduling...now that's where things can get sticky.
Posted on November 21, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Our newly expanded crew, just back from a weeklong rehearsal residency at UT Austin, is now getting a grip on the great size of it. We added eight musicians to the work and, what's more, they all agreed (with the exception of one participant who is still working somewhere out there on the Pacific Rim) to join us in Texas. What we have is a whole new audio vocabulary. We've laptops with reconstructive software, reed instruments, handmade cranked objects, trumpets, tongs, and multiple other nameless sources. For a moment we attempted to provide a guzheng but had to let it go til the next rehearsal week in early January of '07.
Posted on October 31, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)
in which the unbelievable & complex logistical lattice begins to make it's true portent known...the gigantic amount of heaving, lifting & mundane doing necessary...*must* *channel* *James* *T* *Kirk*...don't know if I can hold on....*must*...for the children...
wait a sec...this is supposed to be fun, right?
no?
Posted on September 10, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Your composers and invited collaborators laid a stream of consciousness audio bed throughout the San Francisco Asian Art Museum on a recent Thursday evening in summer, in support of three Yugen actors dancing three pieces for a crowd of maybe 300 people. Some of our friends showed up and we may have have made many more. We were very well treated by the museum staff and, thankfully, were well-received by an attentive audience.
Performers that night:
Yuriko Doi - koken (look it up!)
Jubilith Moore - dance/singing
Libby Zilber - dance/singing
Sheila Berroti - dance/singing
Jason Stamberger - synthesis/sounds
Liz Albee - trumpet/sounds
Dina Emerson - vox/tuned glass/sounds
Moe!Stiano - percussion/sounds
Greg Buethin - percussion/sounds
Suki O'Kane - samples/percussion/sounds
Allen Whitman - guitar/vox/sounds
Posted on July 10, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)
North Fork, CA, bills itself as the center of California and for the last week it was the center of the Cycle Plays universe as the crew took over a family vacation house on the Circle W ranch and made it up as we went along. By now we've all figured out the methodology: at some point during the day Fearless Leader suggests an implausable stage direction such as "show me a twelve year old girl vomiting fans as she rides a horse that is being goaded to ever greater speed by a rat that is biting the horses neck" and cast members will invent various representations using movement, stylized Noh dance forms and even (gasp) method acting. As for us, we can see the song stanzas coming from pages away...by the time they arrive we're giving every impression of knowing exactly what we're doing, furiously throwing melodies out over chord progressions, writing them down and recording them to DAT so they don't disappear as quickly as they arrive. The cast, observing our intense focus, are sympathetic and supportive; they do the same thing with their craft. We must be somewhat careful though, as the cast imprints all too quickly, mimics that they are...if we hit them with a melody and later attempt to change it, things become confusing. Maybe now would be a good time for me to learn to write musical notation.
Posted on June 14, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)
There are only so many minutes, hours, days...this particular free day, a beautiful sunny, clear and cool early summer wonder, *must* be spent inside, organizing the various audio files floating at multiple levels in the file heirarchy of my desktop computer. Holiday bbq invitations aside, if I don't do this now I'll obsessively think about what I haven't done. We have a week's worth of new rehearsal work to accomplish in the five days we'll be in the North Fork Compund and it's happening in less than two weeks. So I'm looking for coherent musical ideas to build set-pieces upon. While we are in full improvisational mode we're streaming along without thought. Now I return to these long and large soundfiles, to tease out the interesting and useable. Blah, I'm not asking for sympathy or validation.
Posted on May 28, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)
It's amazing that our little cadre of independent (i.e.: Not Aligned With Any Organized Entertainment Entity Traded On A Stock Exchange) musicians is so booked. In response to a formal invitation recently all express interest bordering on fascination and many are, sadly, already logistically betrothed. One multi-instrumentalist will be in the mythical Arcadian Territory of the American northwest, performing with stiltwalkers. Another will be touring in support of a Standard Singer/Songwriter Model. Still others are promised in Europe or the Balkan States. One accepts with a caveat that they may get a better monetary offer and, if they do, they will take it. Herding cats ain't in it. But several have accepted unconditionally (barring hell or high water). Will a second set of invitees be second best? Don't you beleive it. Oftentimes the first choice is decidedly *not* the right choice, as evidenced by spectacular results following the next round. You never know what's going to happen.
In other news: My briefly beloved warehouse 6 is not an option, according to J. Her research has uncovered the fabulously decrepit building's status as "condemned." A damn shame.
Posted on May 17, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Living & breathing the at-first-blush merely interesting then astonishing and finally appalling end-realization of the debate surrounding recorded audio media's proliferation and tacit contribution to the creation of the portable popular song as the banishment of the power of music to it's practical occult status makes for transcendant & strange experience. Great beauty contained in absurdity. Laughter in loss. Brutality in orderliness. Sacred decay. Sometimes we sing for no purpose.
Posted on May 07, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)
The San Francisco/Bay Area saw so many days of consecutive rainfall in Spring of '06 we may have set a record. Eventually I found myself laughing helplessly as yet another morning of pelting, obscuring downpour slowed everything to a crawl and brought the ants inside. But then the sky cleared and briefly the air was as clean as if we lived at 10,000 feet.
We cleared our heads of cabin fever romping through a graveyard.
Posted on May 07, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Carneyball Johnson, an electrifed quartet of which I am currently a member, performed several shows in the Los Angeles area in early April of '06 and I took the opportunity on a Saturday to take a bass guitar lesson from the legendary Carol Kaye. Passionately engaged in sharing her unique musical (and to a lesser extent, cultural) knowledge, she filled me with so much information that when I left I was quite befuddled, and feeling somewhat untrusting of my 35-odd years of bass playing (to say nothing of a lifetime of musical immersement). Humbled, I yelled out loud out of frustration, possibly causing my car to swerve slightly on the busy I5, headed south, back into the Los Angeles basin.
Beginner's Mind, grrr.....
Posted on May 07, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (1)
The musicians and the Yugenauts spent another semi-coherent week together in late-March including, but certainly not limited to, some rehearsing, some discussion and a couple of roadtrips.
I'm trying to get the gist...
Actually, this strange and unfamiliar methodology our fearless Directore is applying to the creation of the Cycle Plays is radical, not just in execution, but in preparation and results. Frankly: it's nuts. The only analog I can come up with is childbirth. Preciously apt perhaps, but relevant. No one can know what we've gotten ourselves into and "we can't work like this." But, secretly, it's a heady stone, intoxicating in its wall-eyed instant of leaping out of the ballon at 40,000 feet to skydive and then float; experiencing every moment as a tingling rush and only after the event is past realizing what's happened, and able to grasp the experience in such a way as to explain it.
This is not the script...we're making it up as we go along.
Carry on! carry on!
Posted on April 16, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Currently reading a biography: "Bing Crosby - A Pocketful of Dreams (the Early Years 1903-1940)" by Gary Giddins. Extremely well-written (most musician bios appear to be pasted together by ex-speed freaks with an ax to grind and a serious case of self-promotion) and, though loaded with minutia, flows smoothly. What's the fascination? Crosby's voice and his ability to use it in a seemingly unselfconscious way. He was a musician first, before he became an entertainment icon. Through an absurdly fortuitous series of synchronistic happenstance, he was able to simply be himself (for the most part) and that "being" translated (with the invention and widespread use of radio, film and later, television) into the Twentieth Centurty's first (and by far most influential) pop star. But really, what's the fascination? There appears to be no evidence of any luxurious doubt about his own work. He walks in, someone hands him a sheet of lyrics (he didn't read musical notation) or a set up for a film scene take, and he runs with it, improvising where necessary, feeling the appropriate moments to press down or pull back. Did he worry about what appeared to be practically effortless? And, if he did, did worry drop away the moment the downbeat hit?
Posted on April 16, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)
In a remarkable display of independent solidarity and either because or in spite of a defiance of the Modern Day Arts Marketing & Promotion mindset, musicians & the Yugenauts* gathered at Noh Space for a one-day introduction & overview of the Noh form and the place of music within its 700 year framework. Can disparate disciplines merge to create viable, relevant art? Can a whole be greater than the sum of its parts? Does it even want to? None of those questions were answered or even addressed. Instead we learned a helluva lot about an ancient dance/ritual art form, ate sandwiches, listened to the rain and blithely tossed about such hot button topics as "binaural brainbeats" & something about loading the super low end of the audio frequency spectrum with two closely positioned tones for the express purpose of creating a third, and lower, fundamental note that can thereby (I want to be part of this research team) effect changes upon the mental/cognitive state of the human mind.
My kind of afternoon.
Aaaa
* - people who run the Theatre of Yugen
Posted on March 25, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)
He's a rebel, Dottie...a loner...so much so that, apparently ostracized from his deeply conservative traditional Noh family, he's taken to stepping *gasp* outside the framework and is bringing his message of passion and living Right Life to the barbaric West. He's Mr. Shonosuke Okura and, having performed for such august personages as the Pope (the last one, silly, not the recent knock-off) and the Dalai-Lama, he's become so revered in his own circle that a design team at Yamaha motorcycles labored almost a decade to create a superbike just for him. He showed us the Drum.
Modern Noh Represent!
Mr. O is doing it his way and for the greater good.
Aaaa
Posted on March 25, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Though not directly related to the particular work for which this diary is created, these snapshots are relevant to other musics and other projects (in their varying forms) which, if Heisenberg has anything to say about it, must, by definition, inform the Primary Subject Matter. To whit:
These three guitars on the couch are being used by Mark G. & me to make some interstitial scene-related music for his documentary films. We're having some success here...
Here are the hands of Tim F. who is planing a fingerboard during the reconstruction of an exceptionally bent solid-body electric guitar. I work with Tim. He is very good.
Here are Joe R. and Jason K. listening, during a rehearsal, to the original demo but only *after* we have learned the song. This continues the tradition of Beginner's Mind.
Here is Moe S. working out on a mid-Thirties era tenor guitar. Naturally his approach to the instrument would strike terror in the mind and heart of the Trad Druids.
Posted on February 26, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)
i'm disgusted by a mental picture of my own use of music as a personal expression of success/achievement/aspirations fulfilled/personal validation and am longing for an unashamed surrender to be a horse for Legba, to punch home a specific emotional message by unabashedly using it as an adjunct to moving picture or static image or even *gasp* a live dance/ritual/movement performance...
...because i want to elucidate a response, i want to cause, specifically, a reaction. you know; trying to break your heart and all that because i'm simultaneously in the process of breaking my own.
selfish, yes.
Aaaa
Posted on January 29, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Nearly a year after Tokyo with the Noh Writer's Workshop, the audio from the Tsukiji Walkabout has made it off the minidisk and into performance. It started with John Oglevee sacrificing his morning's sleep to take us to the Tsukiji Fish Market, snow falling at 4am. He turned around as we approached the concentric circles of the auction, our slush-ski footfalls overtaken by wind and two-stroke engine noise of these lumpers on these steroidical segways. One thing you have to remember, John shouted, is that technically, you aren't supposed to be here. I took field recordings of four different auctioneer songs, certain that they would become melodies for the Cycle Plays, but so far I've just been working with John's instructions.
From a Noodle Minus One plus Joshua Smith performed live in the Mills College Music Building on December 10, 2005, this coda captures
that moment, overlayed with samples of Jack Chandler's House, which I spent a couple hours playing with mallets and bow on Thanksgiving; Michael Zelner's wind synthesis, and Joshua Smith's delay pedals.
-so'k
Posted on January 01, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Bart Trickle and friends fired up (2000 degrees Fahrenheit) some
bronze last Saturday night in Oakland.
(photo by Michael Hayes)
I have this mental picture of a curtain of poured bronze bells of
varying sizes and pitches used to spectacular and delicate effect for
one of the plays...maybe the demon play...a cascading metallic
joyride...
Aaaa
Posted on November 27, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (2)
http://zoka.com/audio/splitlip/limerick.mp3
(rather but not totally)-Unwittingly, the ensemble gathered by Lucio Menegon ran though Ted Kaczynski's limerick last Sunday at Old Ironsides in Sacramento. Ever since Ojai I had been working through this sad episode of K's life (true? too sad to be true? too sad to be false?) in which he punishes a co-worker who would not date him a second time by writing limericks about her in the factory they both worked, and which his brother headed.
I'm sure they were classic limericks, all triplets and filth, but the tuning I wrote on the face of the fleamarket guitar went directly to another hell: two bars of eight, two bars of five, one bar of eight, all performed slowly outside of meter, like a bell ringing quite clearly over a valley, but still unfindable.
On guitars: Lucio Menegon and Wayne Grim
On drums: Jon Brumit and me
On tenor saxophone: Jeff Hobbs
I just wanted the limerick to be un-limerickable, and it shows such promise that it will end up that way. Split Lip did an astonishing thing turning its attention to it, especially after I meticulously scored it, printed it, then left the scores on the counter instead of bringing them to the gig. So I wrote it again at the burrito place and handed it out.
two things:
I feel these two things are deeply in the Limerick.
-so'k
Posted on November 27, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Posted on November 13, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Winterland is everywhere I look, the obsessive theatrical tableau: two girls lie to their parents, sneak out of the house and go to the last concert of the Sex Pistols at Winterland. They arrive too late.The ghost of Johnny Rotten performs for them. He climbs into the radio and turns himself off. End of punk.
Erik Ehn and Yugen are working this story for the next 18 months, but it's now functioning as a filter for me as I stood in the balcony of the great american music hall on halloween:
so'k
Posted on November 02, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Back in Frankenstein, we introduced the actors to Deep Listening via the Tuning Meditation. The resulting songs for Frankenstein have this characteristic "cloud" of tones that the actors chose in the moment. Melody moved toward, or away, from other melody.I kept thinking of Ben Goldberg's composition: All Chords Stand For Other Chords.
For Winterland, the technique resurfaced to an uncertain effect. It could have been launching from a point of familiarity, a gravitation toward my sound, which wasn't really coming out of my mouth due to a tremendously bad headcold, or just a bad idea.
All vocals replaced by snarls.
-so'k
Posted on October 30, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Posted on October 27, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0)
after several hours (even with breaks) my knees begin to cry. how
traditional Noh musicians can kneel, hour after hour....well maybe
their saki intake is a key to this...
but, all purist ethic aside, surrounded on all sides by a berm of
audio erratics left behind by the receding glacier of my pop music
career; simply to observe actors and then grab whatever strikes my
fancy....hold it up to a large diaphragm condenser mic and feed the
signal through various modulating filters or direct the noisemaker's
output through the magnetic field of electric guitar pickups....or i
could simply hit something...
Aaaa
Posted on October 27, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (2)
Libby Zilber asked if the vanload of gear was worth the pack-unpack-pack-unpack and, as I gathered all the quarter-inch cable, I reminded her it was far less than before. Apres-Frankenstein we knew what we would actually use to compose (leave the organ at home), and, I noticed, had reserved what little space was left for things that held some uncertainty.
I planned to do no-input mixing, but a head cold shortened my days considerably. What was supposed to be a routine evening shift never occurred.
-so'k
Posted on October 24, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)