Pretentious

I recently, half-joking, described the Cage and Cardew pieces Scenic Railroads will be performing next month as "looking at a bunch of lines on paper and making sounds from them." The woman I was speaking to looked at me awkwardly and replied, not-half-jokingly, "how pretentious."

It seemed exceptionally odd at the time. The pieces are almost 50 years old at this point; the idea hardly seems novel. But the real irony of the situation - that my description could have applied to several thousand year's worth of performed music's history - didn't sink in until a day later. Pretentious, indeed.

Gilden, Bruce: Haiti [inspiration]

The recent events in Haiti reminded me of Bruce Gilden's book of the photographs taken there in the 1980's, which I stumbled across a while back when researching album art. It's a fascinating reminder that the country was simultaneously beautiful and devastating long before the earthquake.



Only a few of the images are online (and definitely not the best) but I highly recommend checking your local library or used bookseller. You can read a brief Haiti-specific interview on his photo agency's site here as well.

(of Autoschediastic Doom)

Last month I participated in an evening of randomly-grouped improvisations at the Legion of Doom here in Columbus. Bbob Drake, who was also on hand with his modular synthesizer, has posted recordings of the whole evening on his site.

http://www.fluxmonkey.com/autoschediastic/

Defying all odds associated with names in hats, I was called on to perform in five of seven sets that night, about three more than I'd prepared for. It played out just fine, but was quite a night's work.

Split Cassette with Jason Zeh (2005)

No idea who uploaded this, but it's worth a listen. Copies of this were made for the Electro-Acoustic Punch in the Face tour that took us across the Midwest and out the Pacific coastline that year. Hard to believe it almost a half-decade ago.

Mediafire