Tuesday, February 12, 2008

6 months of non-silence....

If you think that your personal phobias, hysteria, and foibles are not so interesting that everyone in the world is dying to know about them, blogging can be a real dark night of the soul. What is worth saying?

That you're content in ways that were unimaginable back when you were a child and assumed you'd grow up to be inexplicably tall and blond and living in a domed city with a flying car?

That seems to go without saying, since one is really talking about the texture of areal life. Some textural elements:

We're breaking the record for the most snowfall in a Madison winter ever.

My little group with fellow laptopper Brad Garton and mandolinist Terry Pender is going great guns. You can find some live recordings of gigs here and here and here and here.

We're also performing at the upcoming Spark Festival in Minneapolis, which is always an absolutely warm and wonderful time. This is also an opportunity to reconstitute a trio with my percussionist friend Tom Hamer and visualist extraordinaire Mark Henrikson for a gig at the Nomad World Pub, which I'm really excited about.

Jeff Kaiser and I have released a duet recording together as The Desert Fathers - quartertone trumpet and laptops. I'm very proud of it. We had a chance to play together again at the annual International Society for Improvised Music's get-together at Northwestern U. in December.

And on the home front, work on the next major release of Cycling '74's Max - Max 5 - is coming to fruition. I look forward to seeing this enter the world.

RTQE is going strong, with the best of 2007 list up, and new work arriving on a regular basis. It's such a pleasure to do the program. I'm so lucky.